Get Families Talking! Designing AR Exhibits for Conversation

Wednesday, April 5th: 12:15pm - 1:00pm

Presenters:

Sarah Olsen

Research Lead @ Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley

Kathryn Quigley

Senior Digital Producer @ Lawrence Hall of Science

Mac Cannady

@

eddie carbin

Exhibit Designer @ Gizmo

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Paper Abstract

Family groups are an important subset of visitors to museums, and conversation between different generational members is an important aspect of their learning experiences. Research in the field of family learning has shown that the design of activities and exhibits has a direct impact on the quality of learning conversations between children and caregivers (Kelly et al., 2020; Marcus et al., 2017; Pagano et al., 2020). Technologies such as virtual, mixed, and Augmented Reality (AR) have been shown to have positive outcomes in educational settings, but their implications have only recently been investigated for the purpose of intergenerational group learning design (Yun et al., 2022). Findings from our recent literature (part of an IMLS grant award #MG-40-18-0005-18) review provide design guidelines for AR intergenerational group learning that researchers and exhibit designers can use to foster better learning, interaction, and engagement for intergenerational group learning (Yun et al., 2022). Our session and paper will build upon this work to share how we designed an AR exhibit to support family conversation and findings from the study we conducted to investigate how the exhibit supported learning conversations in adult-child groups. At the end of the session, we will also share a handout/link of AR design guidelines and an evaluative rubric for supporting family conversation in exhibit development.

The beginning half of our proposed session will provide an overview of the Bugtopia exhibit and give audience members an opportunity to try a demo of AR. First, we will start with a brief introduction of our exhibit and the design features that support intergenerational learning. Second, we will go over the specific type of AR technology we leveraged for this exhibit, detailing how our technology solution avoids bottle necks around device rental and staff facilitation. Finally, we will offer the audience an opportunity to try a lite version of our exhibit that can be

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