Virtual Science Museums as Learning Environments:
Interactions for Education
Becky Orfinger
The influence of the Internet World Wide Web (hereafter called the Web) on our society is growing at an astounding rate. When the Web first went mainstream in 1995, the majority of users simply utilized their browsers for entertainment purposes, or to get the latest news. At that time, the majority of Web users were relatively young, computer-savvy people who chose to actively seek out an Internet connection from a commercial provider (e.g. Prodigy). According to the most recent survey conducted by Georgia Tech's Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center (GVU), in 1998, the general demographics of the user population moved closer to the characteristics of the general population. During this year, the second-most popular use of the Web was education, and a startling 90% of survey respondents voiced the opinion that the Web was indispensable in their daily lives.
Given the ever-increasing popularity of the Web, it is not surprising that a large number of both formal and informal educational organizations, including science museums, have established themselves on-line. The Web site of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), an international collaborative effort of science museums, has links to more than 200 member museums. The majority of these sites do not simply list hours and driving directions, but provide a potential visitor with an in-depth look at the museum exhibits. The most exemplary science museum sites have an interactive component that, if used correctly, can give the virtual visitor the feeling that he or she is really at the museum experiencing the exhibit. If that visitor is a student in a third or fourth grade classroom, the experience of navigating through the museum on-line (with the aid of a teacher) can have many of the educational benefits of a field trip.
Although there have been no published studies of the educational benefits of virtual museums, there is existing literature detailing the positive effects the Web can have in the classroom. Last spring, Social Education Magazine published an article by Elizabeth Wilson (1998) that looked at the advantage of using the Web to teach a social studies lesson about early United States history. Wilson, an education professor at the University of Alabama, proposes a hypothetical lesson in which students take a virtual field trip to Philadelphia's Historic District. According to the lesson plan, students would log on to the Web and plan their virtual trip. While the teacher would suggest certain sites to visit (ideally the sites that allow for the most interaction between student and computer), the sequence of the trip would be up to the individual student. The self-structured nature of the virtual trip allows a degree of autonomy that would no doubt have educational benefits. Former Franklin Institute Museum Director Joel Bloom (1992) has written about the merits of exploring a science museum at a self-chosen pace, and his reasoning applies to virtual trips like the one Wilson describes in her article. The fact that Bloom chose to use the word "browse" in this case is purely incidental, but it makes the case for Web-based interactive learning even stronger.
Another reason that the use of the Web in the classroom has been widely supported is because of the benefits it provides for teachers. Wilson writes that on-line resources can reduce the amount of teacher preparation, provide a variety of information sources that would either be impossible or too expensive to obtain, and offer a degree of student control and interactivity that is difficult to achieve otherwise. While it would be financially impossible for students in an underdeveloped area of New Mexico to visit the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., it might be possible to transport them there with the click of a mouse. Even in wealthier school districts, taking kids on a field trip to London's Science Museum is just not feasible, even though there would be a lot to learn from such a trip.
There are other practical advantages to virtual visits to museums rather than actual field trips. In an article in the London newspaper The Observer, John Naughton (1998) humorously expounds upon some of the benefits of a museum's existence on-line:
"The great thing about virtual museums is that they exist only in cyberspace and as such lack these features: leaky roofs, queues of customers with smelly socks, crocodiles of unspeakable children at half term, trade unions, maternity leave, and staffs which make actual museums difficult to administer. Virtual museums are like ideal universities: all those libraries and research labs, and not an undergraduate in sight."
Yet another advantage to virtual science museum visits has to do with the time that exhibits remain on display. Museum exhibits change rather frequently. While there are some permanent exhibits on display in many science museums, space constraints and museum policy limit the run that certain attractions can have. On the Web, however, such constraints don't exist and the amount of available space on the servers of well-known museums is tremendous. The implications of this are that exhibits that were once on display at the museum can be archived indefinitely on the Web. For example, the National Air and Space Museum's (NASM) site has a special section devoted to on-line exhibits that used to be on display at the museum. The most recently archived exhibit is the Enola Gay fuselage, which was in the NASM from 1995 until May of this year. The length of time it will be on display on the NASM Web site is noted next to a photo of the aircraft: indefinite. That way, generations of students can continue to learn and benefit from the Enola Gay exhibit. Many virtual museum sites also allow for the interactive, 'mouse-on' (rather than hands-on) learning experiences that characterize many science museum experiences.
The most interactive virtual museums allow the user to explore an exhibit in greater detail by providing supplementary information in the form of text hyperlinks, QuickTime (QT) movies, Virtual Reality (VR) applets, or Shockwave games. Other multimedia components that a virtual visitor might use to enhance his or her learning experience are audio recordings (usually with LiveAudio) and LivePicture Viewer, which offer the visitor a real-time glimpse into what is actually happening at the museum. These technologies make an on-line exhibit different from a gallery of pictures a student might see in a science textbook and allow for some degree of exploration of the phenomena being demonstrated. At the Exploratorium's Web site, for example, a visitor can click on the Memory exhibit and read about the science behind this neurological phenomenon. Then, the user is encouraged to play a Shockwave game that demonstrates how difficult it is to remember specific details of a design. This reinforces the concept that was introduced and hopefully encourages the visitor to further explore the science of memory.
Research Questions and Data Collection
The goal of the research conducted for this article was to evaluate the educational value of science museum Web sites. More specifically, I wanted to determine how interactive these sites were and find out if virtual museum visits could have some of the same possibilities that real science museum trips have been shown to have.
Initially, I believed that I would have to examine a very large number of science museum Web sites so that I could draw a valid conclusion about the educational value of such sites. However, the majority of science museums in the world have a Web site; a Yahoo search for science museums and exhibitions produced hundreds of site matches. To narrow down the list, I consulted the Association of Science-Technology Center's (ASTC) Web site. Instead of going through every site listed on the ASTC page, I first selected the museums that are known for being very interactive and hands-on (Exploratorium, Franklin Institute, National Air and Space Museum, etc.). This turned out to be a great place to start because the Web sites of most of these museums were also the most interactive and educational. Once I had an idea of what the best Web sites were like, I was able to go through the rest of the links and pick out other exemplary sites. I ended up choosing sixteen of the most interactive museum sites by the time I had gone through the entire ASTC list of United States science museum Web sites:
Academy of Natural Sciences: http://www.acnatsci.org
Arizona Science Center: http://www.azscience.org
The Bakken Library and Museum: http://www.bakkenmuseum.org
The Computer Museum: http://www.tcm.org
Exploratorium: http://www.exploratorium.edu
Franklin Institute: http://sln.fi.edu
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum: http://www.aahom.org
Liberty Science Center: http://www.lsc.org
Miami Museum of Science: http://www.miamisci.org
Milton J. Rubenstein Museum Of Science and Technology: http://www.most.org
Chicago Museum of Science and Industry: http://www.msichicago.org
National Air and Space Museum: http://www.nasm.si.edu
New York Hall of Science: http://www.nyhallsci.org
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry: http://www.omsi.edu
Science Museum of Minnesota: http://www.sci.mus.mn.us
St. Louis Science Center: http://www.slsc.org
Due to the limitations of this research project, I did not look at the Web sites of non-U.S. museums very closely. Most of the international sites I did browse through, however, were not nearly as interactive as the U.S. sites I chose to examine in-depth. Once I had chosen the exemplary sites, I created a coding protocol so that I could easily compare the components of each of the Web sites to one another. As I looked at all of the sites, I recorded the following information on my coding sheet:
Name of museum
Web site address
Intended audience(s)
The amount of exploration that could be done on the site (rough estimate)
Description of exploratory/interactive components
Whether there was a museum magazine or newsletter available
What kind of links were provided to visitors o Description of games/activities available for users
Whether users could e-mail or submit science questions via form
Types of educational resources that were provided for teachers and/or parents
Whether student work was on display
Commercial aspects of site (i.e. was there an on-line museum store?)
Other unique features of the site
Plug-ins that were necessary to download in order for the user to experience the full interactivity of the site.
It is important to note that because of the nature of my research, the data collected is more qualitative than quantitative. Calculating percentages and doing statistical analyses would not have been effective in this case. Rather than finding out how many science museum sites were interactive, I set out to examine the educational value of such sites. There is no formula for determining whether a tool is educational or not.
Results
After examining the sixteen sites in great detail, I concluded that virtual museum visits can have comparable educational value to actual science museum field trips. With the correct plug-ins, visitors to these exemplary sites can experience a wealth of interactive on-line exhibits and, in some cases, use the mouse to navigate through an exhibit currently on display at the given museum. Multimedia components, such as audio and video, give the visitor the feeling that he or she is really at the museum. Shockwave games can drive the scientific message home, unbeknownst to a kid just trying to have fun with technology. The nature of the hypertext medium in which these virtual museums exist makes it possible for users wanting even more information about a scientific phenomenon to jump out of the museum site (via a hyperlink) and back in once they have gotten their questions answered.
Site Commonalties
Although each of the sixteen sites had very distinct qualities, they shared some common components. All sixteen have an interactive component, whether it was a Virtual Reality gallery tour or simply a trivia game from which visitors can garner scientific knowledge. All but two of the sites (Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and St. Louis Science Center) have a large number of science and science education links to other Web sites. All of the sites have some sort of an education section. In most cases, this section consists of link lists especially geared for teacher use, suggested classroom activities to do before a field trip to the museum, and teacher's guides for exhibits.
Six of the sites have an Ask an Expert feature, in which students are encouraged to e-mail museum educators questions specifically relating to an exhibit or about science in general. All but five of the sites have an on-line store, where interested visitors can buy the same museum memorabilia that is found in actual museum gift shops.
Site Examples
This section provides an overview of what makes three of the exemplary sites as educational as I am proposing that they are. Of course, the best way to get the full experience of navigating through these sites would be to do just that, but I will do my best to paint a representative picture.
Exploratorium, San Francisco
According to the Exploratorium Server statistics, since the inception of the museum's Web site in December 1993, an astounding 132,585,374 visitors have surfed their way in. This is not surprising, since the site appeared to me to be the best-designed and the most interactive of all the science museum sites I looked at for this research. Their home page includes a list of more than 25 awards that the site has won since it first started to grow.
One of the most impressive parts of the Exploratorium site is the sheer number of interactive on-line exhibits it has. Currently, there more than 30 on-line exhibits and activities on the Web site, partly because nearly all of the Exploratorium's former exhibits end up permanently archived 1998. Inside the (real) Exploratorium, Memory opened in May of this year, and will be on display until early January 1999. On the Exploratorium Web site, however, the exhibit will be archived indefinitely.
The on-line Memory exhibit is a good example of how virtual museum visits can be both enjoyable and educational. The Features section of the exhibit includes a sheep brain dissection, which users can either click through at their own pace or watch on video by downloading the RealPlayer plug-in; Memory Artist, an interactive display of one artist's renderings of his childhood; and Nagasaki Journey, a photographer's trip back in time by way of his pictures of World War 11. By themselves, these exhibits are quite informative and enjoyable, although geared for an older audience that already understands something about memory. In all three exhibits, it is the close-up, high resolution images that are the main focus, but there is background information given about the science behind each step of the dissection, and about the history of the Memory Artist and the Nagasaki photographer.
For younger visitors who enjoy the eye-pleasing images but don't understand the science behind the featured Memory exhibits, there is a collection of games that are fun because of the human ability (or inability) to remember. Droodles, for example, is a game (requiring the Shockwave plug-in) that presents the user with four abstract designs matched up with nonsense names (like blish and rist). The user is instructed to stare at the pictures and their corresponding names, and then press the Begin button. Upon pressing the button, the pictures go away, but the names remain. The goal of the game is to draw the correct designs next to the correct names, using the pencil and eraser tools provided. At the end of the game, the user can click the What's Going On? button to find out why it is so hard to reproduce a drawing from memory. Another game, Common Cents, shows the user twelve images of a penny, only one of which is the picture of a real penny. The goal is to click on the correct image. Even if the user makes the wrong choice, he or she still benefits because he or she is given an easy-to-understand explanation of memory for everyday objects.
The Exploratorium Observatory is another section of the site that takes advantage of the Web's multimedia capabilities. This section is divided up into Sunspots, Solar Eclipse, and Auroras. In the Sunspots section alone, users can listen to RealMedia clips of physicist David Dearborn describing the importance of the sun in ancient cultures, examine magnified images of sunspots, and watch a QuickTime movie comparing visible and x-ray images of the sun over time. Plus, on the main page of the Exploratorium Observatory, there is an activity that utilizes JavaScript's ability to change browser output based on user input. In Your Weight on Other Worlds, the user enters his or her weight by typing it in a box on the screen, and then the browser displays what he or she would weigh on each of the nine planets, the moons of Jupiter, and several different types of stars. To get more information about this changing weight phenomenon, the user can click on the pictures of the planets, moons, and stars to get a clear and understandable explanation.
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)
On the main page of the OMSI Web site, visitors are encouraged to click on the RatCam: 'Straight from our Life Sciences Hall to your Web browser comes live, up to the minute images of Cinderella and Princess Gruesome. You can help us observe their behaviors!' Upon clicking on the RatCam link, visitors are given a glimpse into the everyday activities of the hairless domestic A QuickCam attached to a computer in the museum provides a streaming video feed. Besides the live rat pictures, the RatCam page also includes a QuickTime video of the newest rat litter being born. The user can manipulate the video so he or she can watch it at her own pace, pausing it or rewinding it whenever he or she wants. Once the visitor has observed the activities of Cinderella and the other rats, he or she is encouraged to click on the 'Send us your observations" link and e-mail the museum educators a description of what he or she has seen. In addition, the page provides limited information about the history of the rodents at OMSI, and about the habitat that has been created for them at the museum.
Besides the RatCam, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Web site has other interactive science learning activities geared especially toward Forest Puzzles, an exhibit available exclusively on-line, provides kids in grades 3-8 with a wealth of information and activities about Pacific Northwest forests and forestry. Visitors to this section of the site can explore one or more of the following forest subjects: Forest Cycles, Forest Management, and Forest Products. In the Forest Cycles section, users can click forward and/or back, in time to witness an example of forest succession common to the Pacific Northwest area. Questions raised in the introductory section of the Forest Cycles section encourage the visitor to think about the science behind the forestry changes over time. The Forest Management section educates the user about the several different viewpoints on forest preservation, and asks him or her to make decisions when presented with hypothetical deforestation situations. The Forest Products section stresses the importance of recycling through an activity called Supply and is activity, users are I different wood products (a house, a newspaper, a log, etc.) and asked to click on each of the pictures to find out how many trees were used to create the particular product. In addition, visitors can watch a QuickTime movie that shows the process of paper recycling.
National Air and Space Museum
The on-line version of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), part of the Smithsonian Institution, has almost as many on-line exhibits and activities as the Exploratorium. Besides utilizing the QuickTime, RealVideo, and Shockwave technologies that I described as part of the Exploratorium and OMSI sites, the NASM site uses an even more interactive tool: virtual reality (VR) navigation. With the Live Picture Viewer plug-in, visitors to the NASM site can navigate through certain exhibitions as if they were there in real life. By holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse, the visitor can actually 'walk' through the exhibit as it really is in Washington, D.C. Double clicking on an object of interest brings up additional information about that object. The shift and control keys on the keyboard are used to either zoom in or out of parts of the exhibit. Unfortunately, the exhibit that takes full advantage of this VR navigation, Star Wars: Magic of Myth, has probably the least scientific content of any exhibit at the NASM, but it is easy to see how the technology can work for more traditional scientific exhibits as well.
In the Star Wars virtual gallery, George Lucas welcomes the user, as long as he or she has the Real Audio plug-in installed on his or her computer. Navigating through the exhibit is very easy and only requires a little practice with the mouse. A gallery map also shows where every part of the exhibit is located relative to each other, so the user knows what direction to move in. During my visit (my first time using the VR navigation tool), I chose to click on the models of R2-D2 and C-3PO on display in the museum. Having only seen the Star Wars trilogy once, I really don't know much about the history behind the characters. After clicking on them, though, I got to hear two audio clips from Star Wars and see concept drawings of the robots that eventually led to their final construction.
While this example is not directly related to science, it is on display at a science museum site. And this leads me to assume that in the future the NASM site won't have just a virtual Star Wars gallery, but virtual versions of some of their other well-known exhibitions such as Milestones of Flight, Space Race, and GPS: A New Constellation. In these types of exhibits, users would click on the planes or spaceships on display in the museum gallery to get more information, just as I was able to click on the lovable robots in the Star Wars virtual gallery.
Discussion
In a recent study looking at the use and navigation patterns of one science Web site, William Eveland and Sharon Dunwoody explain that their research is driven by the assumption that the World Wide Web will become an increasingly common source of all types of information for the public, eventually taking its place as one of several dominant means of informal learning. Judging by the high quality of the virtual museums that I examined in the present study, it seems that the Web has already become a reputable source of scientific information.
The degree to which the on-line science museum exhibits I looked at are interactive is astounding. Feher has written that one of the most fundamental aspects of any interactive museum exhibit is that it allows the visitor to experience phenomena of which he was completely unaware or incompletely aware. Obviously, it is easier to experience such phenomena in person at an actual museum than it is on-line, but most of the museum sites I looked at introduced the visitor to new scientific wonders. For example, one part of the Exploratorium site that I did not describe in detail demonstrates optical illusions. Provided that the Shockwave plug-in is loaded on the browser, the user can try to make two lines parallel, find the center of an arrow, and manipulate the size of two circles until they become equal. Each of these seemingly simple activities is an optical illusion in disguise, and besides providing the game, the Exploratorium site provides an explanation as to why certain patterns and colors are confusing to the human eye. In actual museums, the most interactive exhibits are the ones in which users can manipulate an object and see what the outcome of that manipulation is. Robert Semper, Associate Director of the Exploratorium, cites the resonant pendulum exhibit at his museum as an example of an exhibit that invites interaction. It is a 300-pound pendulum with a metal collar surrounding the weight. Visitors can swing the pendulum after throwing very weak magnets onto the metal collar and pulling on the attached cords. If one pulls in phase with the motion of the pendulum, the motion is reinforced; if one pulls out of phase, the magnet drops off immediately. This exhibit is dramatic and fun. It is obvious how to make it work, and the significance of resonance is apparent.
A striking parallel can be drawn between the interactivity of this live Exploratorium exhibit and the Droodles game on the Exploratorium's Web site explained above. Semper stresses that the pendulum exhibit is fun in part because it is easy to understand the scientific principle behind the phenomenon. In the Droodles game, part of the on-line Memory exhibit, visitors are having fun as well, trying to draw from memory. Once they click on the explanation for why it is so hard to complete the task at hand, they can at once identify the science behind the game.
A museum exhibit that is interactive, writes Joel Bloom, 'can inspire visitors to ask questions, to pursue newfound interests on their own' leading to lasting knowledge. One way of pursuing a topic of interest further on the Web is to jump from the current page to another via a hyperlink. As noted above, the majority of the museum sites that I looked at provided comprehensive lists of science links relating to the topics of the museum's exhibits. For example, it is very easy for a kid interacting with the Forest Puzzles exhibit at the OMSI site to get more information about forestry in the Pacific Northwest. The last part of the exhibit is a page of forest links. Considering the merits of interactivity from this 'knowledge inspiring' point of view, it is certainly justifiable to defend the educational value of museum exhibits on the Web. These exhibits don't just provide scientific information to the visitor; they pro- vide him or her with a jumping off place for even more knowledge about the topic at hand.
The major limitation to this study is the fact that I am drawing conclusions about the educational value of a technological tool based on research done on a computer with a direct Ethernet connection to the Web. On the Dell machine that I used in the CIT lab in Upson, none of the virtual museum sites took longer than 20 seconds to fully load, and even downloading free plug-ins was not an obstacle. Because of the high bandwidth of the direct connection, the most time it took to download and install a plug-in was about 2 minutes.
On machines that do not have a direct connection to the Internet, this would obviously not be the case. Even with a cable modem connection, it would to significantly longer for pages to load and for plug-ins to download. Since most home computers connect to the .Web with a 56 kb/s or slower modem, this would mean that some of the multimedia aspects of the exemplary sites (i.e. audio and video components) would take minutes or longer to access. Most people get frustrated about having to wait for longer than a few seconds for something to load and will hit the stop button before the process is complete. Thus, in cases in which a computer is accessing the Web via a slow modem, graphic- and plug-in heavy sites like the Exploratorium and the NASM would not have nearly the educational value that they have on high-bandwidth machines.
Conclusions and Implications for Further Research
My study has clearly demonstrated the fact that (with a fast connection to the Web) exemplary museum Web sites are both interactive and educational. As the Web increasingly becomes more of a presence in the classroom, perhaps virtual science museum trip will become as commonplace as actual museum field trips. In order to determine just what grade levels such virtual trips are appropriate for, further research needs to be done in the classroom. By directly observing how kids interact with the Web and the interactive exhibits that are offered by these exemplary sites, we will be able to come to a consensus about the role of the science museum in the classroom.
Another area of research that stems from mine deals with technological readiness for these graphic-heavy and high-bandwidth-reliant sites in schools. As explained above, these sites will not have the educational value I found them to have unless the browsers on which they are being viewed are fully equipped to handle them. Is it financially possible for the majority of schools in our country to obtain Tl or greater connections to the Internet? Is there any governmental support for such an expense?
For the time being, those schools and homes that do have sophisticated computer systems (and kids) should be inclined to take advantage of these stellar museum sites on the next rainy While virtual science museum visits not provide an equal level of intellectual stimulation as actual museum visits have been proven to, they certainly can stimulate a child's appetite for more science and increase the desire to find out more about the world around him.
References
Bloom, Joel. 'Science and Technology Museums Face the Future." In: Museums and the Public Understanding of Science, edited by John Durant. London: Science Museum, 1992; p. 19.
Eveland, William P, and Dunwoody, Sharon. "Users and Navigation Patterns of a Science World Wide Web Site for the Public." Public Understanding of Science 7(1998): 285-31 1.
Feher, Elsa. "Interactive Museum Exhibits as Tools for Learning: Explorations With Light." International Journal of Science Education. 1990: v. 12, 1, pp. 35-49.
Naughton, John. "The Trouble With Real Museums is That They're Filled With Real People." London: The Observer, September 7, 1997, p. 7.
Semper, Robert J. "Science Museums as Environments for Learning." Physics Today 43(11): 50-56 (November 1990), p. 57.
Wilson, Elizabeth. "A Trip To Historic Philadelphia on the Web." Social Education 61(3): 170-72 (1997).
Becky Orfinger completed this research as part of her undergraduate studies with Dr. Bruce Lewenstein, faculty member at Cornell University in Ithaca NY and a member of the ILR's Advisory Board.