As our group began to discuss ideas for our exhibit, a clear theme in our thoughts was the idea that visitors had to be involved in the exhibit. In keeping with the class's notion that learning is most effective when it is directed by the learner, we wanted to create a number of experiences in which the visitor could choose what to investigate, based on their own interests and experiences. This would allow them to find interrelationships involving the rainforest that were personally meaningful in their lives. We were also interested in finding new ways for visitors to experience the rainforest through multiple representations of these interrelationships-from actual video footage of the rainforest to stylized drawings of rainforest animals to stuffed animals and animal sounds.
We
began with the idea for the "canopy climb," which used a climbing rope as
a tangible interface through which to explore the inhabitants of a rainforest
tree. Though we initially envisioned a very broad range of interactions that
could be shown through this interface, we were eventually forced to focus
our ideas in order to make the station a success. In addition to time constraints,
it seemed that showing too many aspects (such as the water cycle, animals,
food chains, etc.) in this one exhibit would be confusing and intimidating.
The final exhibit has a good mix of playfulness both in its interface and
graphics and some excellent content about the animals that inhabit the tree.
We were very fortunate to have a number of second-graders explore our exhibit after the class had passed through. They were quite interested in the canopy climb exhibit. We found one particular advantage to the interface with the rope and binoculars; namely that it allowed two children to explore the tree simultaneously, with one directing vertical motion and one directing what to look at. A number of other children also crowded around these two, telling them what they wanted to see. Clearly the exhibit provided an exciting way for the kids to explore the rainforest environment; it was quite rewarding to observe their excitement-their teachers had to drag them away from the exhibit.
Our second station allowed visitors to explore the food web
in the rainforest. This exhibit was intentionally not comprehensive; after
all, there are thousands of species in the rainforest and showing even a substantial
fraction of them was certainly not feasible. Our aim, then, was focused on
our exhibit's theme-showing interdependence. We only used five animals and
one plant and the connections between them, but this was, we felt, sufficient
for getting the visitor to understand the idea that species depend on each
other for food. Although the same information might have been conveyed by
simply having a poster of the food web, we felt that actually constructing
the web by having the animals and plant interact on the "dinner plate" would
provide a much richer understanding of these 
interrelationships.
The exhibit's design allows visitors to explore the food web through physical
manipulation of stuffed animals. This is both a good use of multiple representations
of the web (both physically and on the screen) but also makes an interesting
connection to a child's everyday life. Many kids probably have cute stuffed
jaguars, monkeys, or snakes, but they likely give no though to the way that
those animals actually live in their natural habitat. Our original design
for this exhibit also involved sound as a way of representing the interaction
between the animals. Admittedly, the interaction between animals is poorly
represented in our final station; though the animals themselves have clear
physical representations in the form of the stuffed animals, the interaction
between them occurs only as beeping crickets and a flashing arrow on the screen.
There is also no feedback when two animals meet who are not connected in the
food web. We felt that sound would have been a good way of showing both that
the animals indeed interacted and indicating which animal ate the other. Having
the animal that's eating the other make a sound would also have saved us from
needing to figure out what a kapok tree sounds like. The capability of removing
any item from the food web and observing the effects on the rest of the web
was also quite beneficial to illustrating the way that animals depend on each
other; it was quite compelling to remove the tree at the bottom of the chain
and watch as the rest of the animals slowly disappeared. However, the lack
of an indicator for overpopulation was, we felt, a strong limitation of the
food web model, since it would appear that the lack of a predator will have
no adverse effects on a species.
I also observed a number of the second-graders using the food web exhibit. Several of them were clearly deeply involved in building the food web, although it seemed that they became somewhat frustrated by the limitations of using crickets for the interactions between animals, such as the necessity for line-of-sight communications between the crickets and the lack of feedback when no interaction occurs. This also drew several children to simultaneously use the exhibit, with each of them grabbing two animals and then all of them working together to find the combinations which existed in the web. I was very pleased to see them so engaged in the exhibit, despite its limitations.
Our
third major station was the "products" station, which encouraged visitors
to reexamine their household products to see how they depend on the rainforest
in their everyday lives. In this exhibit, the personal nature of the exploration
was more explicit, since the items chosen were clearly familiar to the visitor.
However, here too we left the direction for exploration up to the visitor.
There were a number of possible products to examine (one might imagine using
still more in a "real" museum exhibit,) thus leaving the choice up to the
visitor, allowing them to explore the products most familiar to them. There
was a great deal of content available through the web pages that were brought
up when an item was brought over the sensor. I wonder, in fact, if this amount
of text was too overwhelming to the kids who used the exhibit, as they spent
a relatively small time at this station before moving on to the other stations,
which seemed to have greater power to sustain their attention.
A major factor in the overall exhibit's success was one that I had actually argued against spending a lot of our time on: the development of the exhibit space. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that we transformed our corner of the cube with vines, leaves, rainforest sounds and music, as well as simply rearranging the furniture to create a real space for the exhibit. The space was both inviting and clearly defined by our entrance, and the loosely circular layout allowed visitors to flow freely from one exhibit to the next without being constrained by any order that we might impose. Even the relatively simple notion of using consistent graphics for the signage gave the exhibit a cohesion that I had not expected. Subtleties such as putting small plastic animals on tables and railings made the exhibit both whimsical and much more of a real environment in which visitors would be immersed.
All of our exhibits also used interesting bridges between the
digital and physical worlds, making the exhibits both more interactive and
more 
communal.
For example, if the canopy climb or food web had simply been done on a computer
screen, the interaction that a visitor would have had with them would have
been completely different. First of all, only one visitor would have been
able to use it at once, instead of the excited crowd which surrounded both
stations. They would have also clearly seemed very artificial to use, since
certainly no one actually explores the rain forest by clicking a button, and
no one really discovers how animals interact by dragging items around on a
computer screen. The use of physical interfaces in all the exhibits seemed
to make them much more appealing and meaningful to visitors by bringing the
interaction out into the visitor's own space, instead of trying to engage
the visitor in a computer screen.
The only things that I would have liked to change about the exhibit are to include some of our other ideas as well. One particularly fun idea that we didn't end up implementing was to have visitors color in rainforest animals and place them on a projected rainforest environment. We would then have allowed visitors to change the background (say to different layers of the rainforest, or on different plants and trees, and so forth) to see where their animal fits in. Visitors might have kept their creations or left them on a wall for other visitors to see. Another aspect of such an activity might be to have children draw an image of how they relate to the rainforest or who they depend on and who depends on them, and then post them for other visitors to see and spark further conversation about interdependence. It seemed that our exhibit was lacking in guiding visitors to answer these questions, which were posted at the exit to the exhibit. The other major thing that I would have liked to implement was to make more use of sound as a medium for exploring the relationships in the rainforest, both in the canopy climb and the food web stations.
Despite these omissions, I felt that our exhibit was a great prototype, and I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that the children had such a great time exploring it as well. The museum exhibit is an interesting choice for a final project to use the ideas that we've been discussing in the class; though there were only a few examples of the technologies that were introduced in the class being used in the projects, the notions of multiple representations and making personal connections through interacting with the exhibit's content were clearly present in each group's work. I was certainly pleased with the outcome.
