Selected Games

Letter from the museum:

Hi Susan,

Below are the thoughts Mark, Teresa, Carrie, and I had around the pitches:

• We think Past in Pieces and AR Butterfly Scavenger Hunt are most engaging and impactful for us and could be used within the Museum even beyond the class engagements. The one question we would have for both of those is ensuring the students have a process for content accuracy (For example, for Past in Pieces, what is the difference between a fossil and a bone? etc.). We can likely connect them with people to fact-check, but it would help to have a more detailed breakdown of timeline for when that would need to happen and a stage for review.

• We also liked both of the SOS pitches, but we would suggest narrowing down to one concept to focus on. I've included Carrie's thoughts on the technical side of this below. We haven't produced games for SOS before, so this would very much be a learning experience for the students as well as us (and it might involve some failure!). If you are comfortable with students trying this, with the idea that we all might discover it isn't entirely possible to do, we are happy to explore that.

• For Salman's Disinfo Fighters, I think we could easily do a write-up or social media feature in connection to Blurred Realities (I know this is a project for him beyond this class). This might also be an example we could all look to use in Game Changers.

Carrie's SOS Thoughts:

Regarding Science On a Sphere, I'm not sure to what level of detail we can program the sphere, but I am willing to try with the students, just know that we haven't done work like this before and I'm unsure how it will turn out. The most amount of customization that I've done with the Sphere's kiosk is by changing content that appears in the circled locations on the attached image. I don't think this quite captures what your students pitched, although with modifications, I think it could work well. For example, adapting the tornado game could look like having a tab on the left-hand side with the game name/icon. Then, we'd fill the bottom row of datasets within that tab with several videos - see example photo. These video's titles would move people through the game from left to right, beginning with an introductory video and then asking them to choose what to do by selecting what scenario is 'correct'. It doesn't quite allow for the 'ranking' function that was pitched, but each selected scenario could have a short piece of dialogue/text that explains why or why not that selection of type of aid was a good choice. Directions for each step can be verbal and in the grey text box that can be programmed for each dataset. I'm also happy to reach out to a contact at NOAA about if there are more detailed levels of kiosk customization that would better reflect student ideas, I just don't know what the result or response time on that will look like. 

Let me know what questions you or the students have!

Thanks!

Caroline White

Education and Learning Manager

MSU Museum's CoLab Studio

she/her/hers

museum.msu.edu