Child Education

Introduction

Challenge

The Allard Pierson Museum of Amsterdam possesses a rich collection of archaeological artifacts, a large part of which is dedicated to the civilization of ancient Egypt. The goal of the museum is to engage and educate visitors; however, the hardest to educate are children that would mostly be forced to visit the museum and would end up wandering the museum’s halls.

Solution

To solve that challenge, we based our strategy on the 5 steps of design thinking: empathize, define the problem, ideate, prototype and test. We set out to design an interactive installation for the Egyptian exhibition that would encourage children engagement and ultimately would educate them about the fundamentals of the hieroglyphics language.

My Role

My team and I worked together on all aspects of the design of the new interactive installation. We all equally conducted initial user research and defined the key needs and motivations of children in a museum environment, I created the first interaction of our low fidelity prototype and I also helped evaluate our installation through usability tests before and during the Alpha state of our project. An amazing team from the Media college of Amsterdam, with which we collaborated, developed the Alpha version of the product.

Note: UX projects don’t follow a linear methodology. For the purpose of this case study, I will describe the work done, through the various phases, in a linear structure.

Empathize

Having a completely different state of mind from adults, children were a really challenging user group. We conducted desk research in order to understand how children perceive their surroundings, how we can educate children and how to get their attention. In addition, we observed children in the museum premises in order to understand how they interact with the museum and what grabs their attention.

Based on the collected data, we created an empathy map that would visually communicate to us at all times: how children think and feel,what they see, hear, say and do, what they expect to gain, and what would frustrate them.

Define the Challenge

Using the data collected by the Museum and the bibliography,in addition to an empathy map that would help us identify the needs ofchildren, we defined 2 main challenges:

Children are not very interested in museums, they feel that they have to go.
Children have a very short concentration span when bored.

However, we collected some insights about children that later on helped us turn the aforementioned challenges into opportunities.

They are curious when engaged in an activity that they perceive as interesting.
Prefer learning through story telling and interaction.
Want to touch museum exhibits.
Tend to be competitive with each other.

Ideate

We used the crazy 8s technique to generate ideas. This method provided us with a variety of options that we could spin through and evaluate. We evaluated all ideas and one of the ideas I proposed stood out the most during dot voting. We merged a few aspects from other ideas that could enhance the initial experience and we decided on a final idea that could potentially succeed to engage and educate children.

Our idea was to create an interactive installation that would use mini-games and storytelling to teach the use of hieroglyphics to kids. Providing challenges in the form of mini-games would enable learning through interactivity. Continuous storytelling would allow children to invest more time in mini-games and capture their attention for a longer period. In addition, we included an avatar that would be relatable and could act as guide to the story.

Prototype

To quickly evaluate our idea I prototyped it and we tested it with adults. That would give us some first insights on how our idea can have an impact on learning and engagement. Without much effort, we could implement any vulnerabilities in our next prototype iteration.

After some adjustments with the mini-games, we needed to include the story. As part of the team effort to incorporate the story at a clickable prototype, I created story outline that we all later on populated and revised on a storyboard. The storyboard would clearly convey to us how our story flows thus, allowing us to work on our prototype without distractions.

Based on the storyboard, I created the medium fidelity prototype while Corine would revise and translate the story dialog to Dutch.

User Testing and Evaluation

To assess the quality of our prototype’s learning outcomes and engagement, we tested it 3 times. The first time we focused on learning outcomes and the second time on engagement and aesthetics. Based on the feedback we received, we confidently iterated our design on a usable demo that we also tested later on. The third testing focused on both engagement and learning outcomes.

Knowledge Outcome

Nout and I separately performed 2 tests with children (age of 9 and 12), at a controlled environment. I created the testing scenario that was separated into 2 parts. During the first part children were requested to answer a few questions about hieroglyphics after watching 2 minute video. One week later, during the second part children had to answer the same questions after playing through our prototype. This method would clearly show to us if engagement could enhance the learning outcomes. Our testing confirmed our assumptions regarding knowledge gaining.

Engagement and Aesthetics

As part of a team effort, we conducted 12 usability tests with children between the ages of 7 and 12. I was responsible to note reactions (since I wasn’t speaking dutch), while Corine would go through the process with parents and kids. Nout and Chris would note down any comments about the prototype experience. Various feedback sources could help us eliminate any subjective assumptions perceived by a single person during testing.

Based on the feedback received, we adjusted the experience and proceeded with the creation of a demo. We assigned the development of the demo to an exceptional team of graphic designers and game developers from Mediacollege Amsterdam. The goal of the demo was to be aesthetically appealing to children and to be tested with children in the museum premises.

Conclusion

Educating children in an informal environment, and entertaining them at the same time has proven to be a great challenge, which I found that could be overcome by performing extensive user testing.

I learned that small steps are necessary when trying to make big changes. It seemed clear that without breaking down the testing into smaller parts, it would be difficult to understand how each aspect of the solution would affect the final outcome. It was also obvious later on that if we had neglected the evaluation of our idea during the ideation process, we would have missed to consider that the mini-games alone would have been without particular value if we didn’t consider the whole journey through storytelling.

Our final design was successful. Iterative prototyping and user research led to a final product that managed to increase hieroglyphic awareness and use of hieroglyphic fundamental rules in children. In addition it managed to engage and immerse the children in the story making children to want to invest more time in the whole experience.

"I like that I am in Egypt solve riddles!"

Child F

"I am sad that this is not finished because I want to help the mummy enter it's tomb"

Child L

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