Awhile ago, I promised to share some of my experiences in collecting data on visitors’ exhibit use as part of this blog. Now that I’ve actually been back at it for the past few weeks, I thought it might be time to actually share what I’ve found. As it is winter here in the northern [...]
Tag archives for magic planet
Visitor Engagement (via Museum 2.0)
This post by Nina Simon raises some great, eternal questions about visitor engagement. Free-choice learning, by definition, entails agency on the part of the learner. What’s the best way to allow and inspire visitors to provide input and exercise that agency? Simon states the problem well: “The fundamental question here is how we balance different [...]
Wave Tank R&D
We are taking measurements for the wave tank as we speak. Getting the mechanics right will be a bit of a challenge within our exhibit space. We went over to The Hinsdale Wave Lab on Thursday to look at their tanks and discuss the physics. Nothing replaces talking to the experts—we learned a lot. The [...]
New Beginnings
Thanks to a very generous Informal Science Education grant from the National Science Foundation, the Free-Choice Learning Laboratory will soon be experimenting with some very promising emergent technologies. These technologies—soon to be integrated into our research space here at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center (HMSCVC)—include facial recognition, eye-tracking and augmented reality [...]