Crowdsourcing Ideas for Augmented Reality Museum Experiences with Children

Abstract

When the target audience is children, the human–computer interaction community has firmly established the benefits of involving children throughout the design process. Participatory design methods with children have been used successfully for the design of learning. Within the context of museums, there have been shown to be benefits in children designing interactive experiences for themselves and their peers. We therefore conjecture that children can contribute towards the design of engaging learning materials for museums. With space being a premium within museums, the possibility of using augmented reality (AR) with existing exhibits is appealing. With the increased availability of off-the-shelf wearable devices, research in the field of wearable computing has grown in recent years but only a small portion of this research is dedicated to the design of wearable technologies for children. This chapter presents a study that uses specially constructed storyboards to crowdsource ideas for a VR exhibit within a museum in which children were enabled to design low-fidelity interfaces and interactions within an AR context. The storyboards that the children produced were analysed to determine whether the children understood the concept of AR. In addition, the drawings were analysed to establish the ideas generated, the feasibility of the implementation of proposed technology, the interaction methods and, finally, the educational merit. We critically reflect on the ideas proposed by the children and the methodology for generating ideas relating to museum experiences.