Museum Mix Up

The Fred Rogers Center (yes, that Mr. Rogers) was looking for young professionals interested in early learning to propose media projects. I initially proposed an extension of my master’s thesis project, MAPPS. MAPPS was a pictorial planning system for children with autism and their caregivers to reduce anxiety by planning their visits in advance. I was overjoyed to be get a call back from the Fred Rogers Center. Then also disheartened to learn that they didn’t want the MAPPS project. However, they were interested in me as a creator and wanted a new proposal by Monday. It was Friday. I cancelled everything and came up with a new proposal that was accepted.

Project Goals

The goal of the app Museum Mix Up was to create a fun way for children and their caregivers to experience art together. The technology was used to mediate and facilitate, not dominate the experience. Children and their adults go on a ‘scavenger hunt’, creating audio recordings, videos, and photographs to discover new works of art. Once they have completed the scavenger hunt, they receive a ‘thank you’ message from the cartoon characters for being great helpers.

Setbacks

The project had plenty of setbacks along the way. Getting all the artworks necessary to fill the app was a monumental challenge. I got releases from artists and museums that I had existing relationships with first. Then I had to seek out other works of art from museums with open collections policy to stock the rest of the database.

Budgetary constraints meant that the development would stop and start at times. To combat this, I worked ahead of schedule so that the engineers would have the materials they needed as they were available and assigned as personnel on the project.

Teamwork

I worked with leadership from the Fred Rogers Center and in parallel with my other Early Career Fellow from a product design standpoint. TrueFit of Pittsburgh provided engineering, QA, and project management support.

Museum MiX up - Main Menu

This is the main menu of the app. The main functions is to see if they wanted to start a new game or continue a previous game. The icons were set to be large on the buttons to help non-readers understand their functions based on existing icon conventions.

MUseum MiX Up - Level Menu

We decided on a staged approach to the menus. Not only is this a common convention for many games but also it funnels the players’ focus on only the task ahead.

MUSEUM MIX UP - LEvel GamePlay

The individual levels had the player make a video, take a picture, and record a sound clip. The actions themselves require the children to engage with a caretaker as the cameraperson instead of being absorbed into the device itself.