Tag Archives: exhibit

Tech notes

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Here’s a roundup of some of our technology testing and progress lately.

First, reflections from our partners Dr. Jim Kisiel and Tamara Galvan at California State University, Long Beach. Tamara recently tested the iPad and QuestionPro/Survey Pocket, Looxcie cameras and a few other apps to conduct surveys in the Long Beach Aquarium, which doesn’t have wifi in the exhibit areas. Here is Jim’s report on their usefulness:

“[We] found the iPad to be very useful.  Tamara used it as a way to track, simply drawing on a pdf and indicating times and patterns, using the app Notability.  We simply imported a pdf of the floorplan, and then duplicated it each time for each track.  Noting much more than times, however, might prove difficult, due to the precision of a stylus.  One thing that would make this even better would be having a clock right on the screen.  Notability does allow for recording, and a timer that goes into play when the recording is started.  This actually might be a nice complement, as it does allow for data collector notes during the session. Tamara was unable to use this feature, though, due to the fact that the iPad could only run one recording device at a time–and she had the looxcie hooked up during all of this. 

Regarding the looxcie.  Tamara had mixed results with this.  While it was handy to record remotely, she found that there were many signal drop-outs where the mic lost contact with the iPad.  We aren’t sure whether this was a limitation of the bluetooth and distance, or whether there was just too much interference in the exhibit halls.  While looxcie would have been ideal for turning on/off the device, the tendency to drop communication between devices sometimes made it difficult to activate the looxcie to turn on.  As such, she often just turned on the looxcie at the start of the encounter.  It is also worth noting that Tamara used the looxcie as an audio device only, and sound quality was fine.
 
Tamara had mixed experiences with Survey Pocket.  Aside from some of the formatting limitations, we weren’t sure how effective it was for open-ended questions.  I was hoping that there was a program that would allow for an audio recording of such responses.  She did manage to create a list of key words that she checked off during the open-ended questions, in addition to jotting down what the interviewee said.  This seemed to work OK.  She also had some issues syncing her data–at one point, it looked like much of her data had been lost, due in part to … [problems transferring] her data from the iPad/cloud back to her computer.  However, staff was helpful and eventually recovered the data.
 
Other things:  The iPad holder (Handstand) was very handy and people seemed OK with using it to complete a few demographic questions. Having the tracking info on the pad made it easier to juggle papers, although she still needed to bring her IRB consent forms with her for distribution. In the future, I think we’ll look to incorporate the IRB into the survey in some way.”
Interestingly, I just discovered that a new version of SurveyPocket *does* allow audio input for open-ended questions. However, OSU has recently purchased university-wide licenses from a different survey company, Qualtrics, who as yet do not have an offline app mode for tablet-based data collection. It seems to be in development, though, so we may change our minds about the company we go with when the QuestionPro/SurveyPocket license is up for renewal next year. It’s amazing how the amount of research I did on these apps last year is almost already out of date.
Along the same lines of software updates kinda messing up your well-laid plans, we’re purchasing a couple of laptops to do more data analysis away from the video camera system desktop computer and away from the eyetracker. We suddenly were confronted with the Windows 8 vs Windows 7 dilemma, though – the software for both of these systems is Windows 7-based, but now that Windows 8 is out, the school had to make a call as to whether or not to upgrade. Luckily for us, we’re skipping Windows 8 for the moment, which enables us to actually use the software on the new laptops since we will still go with Windows 7 for them, and the software programs themselves for the cameras and eye tracker won’t likely be Windows 8 ready until sometime in the new year.
Lastly, we’re still bulking up our capacity for data storage and sharing, as well as internet for video data collection. I have recently put in another new server to be dedicated to handle the sharing of data, with the older 2 servers as slaves and the cameras spread out between them. In addition, we put in a NAS storage system and five 3TB hard drives for storage. Mark assures me we’re getting to the point of having this “initial installation” of stuff finalized …

Prompting Reflection

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As the lab considers how to encourage STEM reflection around the tsunami tank, this recent post from Nina Simon at Museum 2.0 reminds us what a difference the choice of a single word can make in visitor reflection:

“While the lists look the same on the surface (and bear in mind that the one on the left has been on display for 3 weeks longer than the one on the right), the content is subtly different. Both these lists are interesting, but the “we” list invites spectators into the experience a bit more than the “I” list.”

So as we go forward, the choice not only of the physical booth set up (i.e. allowing privacy or open to spectators), but also the specific wording can influence how our visitors choose to focus or not on the task we’re trying to investigate, and how broad or specific/personal their reflections might be. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do some testing of several supposedly equivalent prompts as Simon suggests in an earlier post as well as more “traditional” iterative prototyping.

Coming to the breaking point

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And I don’t just mean Thanksgiving! Lately, I’ve run across an exhibit, a discussion, and now an article on things wearing down and breaking, so I figured that meant it was time for a blog post.

It started with my visit to the Exploratorium, who find that stuff breaks, sometimes unexpectedly. Master tinkerers and builders that they are, they made it into an exhibit of worn, bent or flat-out broken parts of their exhibits. It may take hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of uses, but when your visitorship is near a million per year, it doesn’t take that many days to find micro-changes suddenly visible as macro changes.

 

Then Laura suggested that we keep track of all the equipment we’ve been buying in case of, you guessed it, breaking (or other loss). So we’ve started an inventory that not only will serve as a nice record for the project of all the bits and bobs we’ve had to buy (so far, over 300 feet of speaker wire for just 10 cameras), but also will help us replace them more easily should something go wrong. Which we know it will, eventually, and frankly, we’ll have a sense of how quickly it goes wrong if we keep our records well. In our water-laden touch pools and wave tanks environment, this very likely will be sooner than we hope.

Finally, John Baek’s Open and Online Lifelong Learning newspaper linked to this story from Wired magazine about the people who are deliberately trying to break things, to make the unexpected expected.

So, have a great Thanksgiving break (in the U.S.), and try not to break anything in the process.

Our PHRED friends

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A new partnership with the Philomath (pronounced fill-OH-muth for you out-of-town readers) High Robotics Engineering Division (PHRED) helped the HMSC Free-Choice learning lab overcome a major information design hurdle. An on-going challenge for our observation system is recording usage of small, non-electronic moveable exhibit components – think bones, shells, levers, and spinning wheels.

PHRED mentors Tom Health and Tom Thompson will work with students to develop tiny, wireless microprocessor sensors that can be attached to any physical moving exhibit component and report its use to our database. The team will be using the popular Arduino development tool that has been the technological heart of the Maker movement.

This is a great partnership – the PHRED team has all the skills, enthusiasm, and creativity to tackle the project and build successful tools – not to mention gaining the notoriety that comes from working on an NSF-funded project. Oregon Sea Grant gains more experience integrating after school science clubs into funded research projects, while meeting the ever-challenging objective of engaging underserved communities.
Thanks to Mark for this update. 

Encouraging Visitor Reflection around STEM

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Do visitors use STEM reasoning when describing their work in a build-and-test exhibit? This is one of the first research questions we’re investigating as part of the Cyberlab grant, besides whether or not we can make this technology integration work. As with many other parts of this grant, we’re designing the exhibit around the ability to ask and answer this question, so Laura and I are working on designing a video reflection booth for visitors to tell us about what happened to the structures they build and knock down in the tsunami tank. Using footage from the overhead camera, visitors will be able to review what happens, and hopefully tell us about why they created what they did, whether or not they expected it to survive or fail, and how the actual result fit or didn’t match what they hoped for.

We have a couple of video review and share your thoughts examples we drew from; The Utah Museum of Natural History has an earthquake shake table where you build and test a structure and then can review footage of it going through the simulated quake. The California Science Center’s traveling exhibit Goosebumps: the Science of Fear also allows visitors to view video of expressions of fear from themselves and other visitors filmed while they are “falling”. However, we want to take these a step farther and add the visitor reflection piece, and then allow visitors to choose to share their reflections with other visitors as well.

As often happens, we find ourselves with a lot of creative ways to implement this, and ideas for layer upon layer of interactivity that may ultimately complicate things, so we have to rein our ideas in a bit to start with a (relatively) simple interaction to see if the opportunity to reflect is fundamentally appealing to visitors. Especially when one of our options is around $12K – no need to go spending money without some basic questions answered. Will visitors be too shy to record anything, too unclear about the instructions to record anything meaningful, or just interested in mooning/flipping off/making silly faces at the camera? Will they be too protective of their thoughts to share them with researchers? Will they remain at the build-and-test part forever and be uninterested in even viewing the replay of what happened to their structures? Avoiding getting ahead of ourselves and designing something fancy before we’ve answered these basic questions is what makes prototyping so valuable. So our original design will need some testing with probably a simple camera setup and some mockups of how the program will work for visitors to give us feedback before we go any farther with the guts of the software design. And then eventually, we might have an exhibit that allows us to investigate our ultimate research question.

What I’ve learned this summer: Julie’s last post

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Pulling it all together and making sense of things proves one of the hardest tasks for Julie:

“I can’t believe this summer is about over.  I only have 3 days left at Hatfield.  Those 3 days will be filled with frantic work getting the rest of my exhibit proposal pulled together as well as my Sea Grant portfolio and presentation done for Friday.  I go home Saturday morning and I haven’t even figured out when I’m going to pack.  Eek.

But back to the point at hand.  Doing social science has been such a fun experience.  I really loved talking to people to get their feedback and opinions on Climate Change and the exhibit.  I’m so excited for this exhibit.  I want it to be fantastic and I’ve been working very hard on it.  I am stoked to visit next summer to see it in the flesh!

One thing that I find really challenging about doing this kind of research though, is pulling together the data and putting it into a readable format for something like my End of Summer Final Presentation on Friday!  The big survey I did, for instance, was 16 questions and the data collected is very qualitative and doesn’t fit neatly into a table on a power point slide.  So I have to determine which things to pull out to show and exactly how to do it.  I feel confident that I’ll get it down, it’s just going to perhaps rob me of some sleep the next couple days.

Today (Tuesday) I finally got to do something that I should’ve done long ago.  Mark took me into the “spy room” as some call it and showed me all the awesome video footage being recorded in the visitor center.  It’s really incredible!  I was able to download a few videos of myself interpreting at the touch tank which Mark suggested would be a good addition to my portfolio.  Now I feel like a real member of the Free Choice Learning crew.”

This summer has given me a wealth of experiences that will really benefit my future…I can’t wait to see what that future holds.