Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.31.11 | Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry is looking for teen designers who can blend digital savvy with physical activity.

In connection with the Museum’s YOU! The Experience exhibit, an app challenge is underway to inspire young people to design an app that will motivate teens to get up and move, using a mobile phone. The contest is open to teens entering grade eight through 12 in the 2011-2012 school year.

Teams of teen developers will turn five finalist ideas into working prototypes, and the MSI will produce and publish the winning concept as an iPhone and Android app, available for free.

Technology and/or sports experience are not required. Entrants are asked to submit a an overview of the concept and storyboards explaining how it would work by the deadline of June 24. View all the details at msichicago.org/appchallenge.

“The Summer App Challenge is great way for teens to use their creativity in a new medium while gaining real-world project skills,” Steven Beasley, MSI’s director of digital media, said in a press release. “We also want to encourage kids to think of themselves at producers, not just consumers, of new media.”

Inspired by the MSI’s mobile app challenge, I took a look at other innovative apps recently created by museums, art foundations and communities.

The Van Gogh in Brabant Foundation, for example, has produced a mobile app that serves as a travel guide to five villages and towns in the Dutch province of North Brabant where van Gogh lived and worked as a young man. Closer to home, Cleveland has done something similar. The Department of History at Cleveland State University formally launched the Cleveland Historical app earlier this month for iPhone and Android phones.

“We’re trying to curate the city as a living museum,” CSU history professor Mark Tebeau told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The app was the result of a collaborative effort involving teachers, students, nonprofits and historical societies. It includes neighborhood tours along with 400 oral histories, 60 videos and more than 1,000 images, including maps and black-and-white historical photographs.

“What Mark’s project is doing is listening as much as speaking and actually collaborating with local students and civic groups,” said Nancy Proctor, head of mobile strategy and initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “It’s like the people’s guide to Cleveland history. It’s not simply developed for the people. It’s developed by the people for the people.”

The website clevelandhistorical.org has a wealth of information about featured sites on the tours, including audio files and photos.

Speaking of the Smithsonian, it has teamed up with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to launch Leafsnap, an iPhone, iPad and Android app that will identify a plant based on a leaf’s silhouette. The app will be released this summer.

“The mobile app uses visual recognition technology to identify the species of a plant based on a photograph of one of its leaves,” writes Megan Gambino at the SI blog. “Each leaf photograph is cross-referenced with a leaf-image library, which [research botanist John] Kress helped compile, based on several measurements of the leaf’s outline. The user then gets a ranked list of the leaf’s closest matches, as well as other information about the species.”

This video shows how it works:

Finally, this Australian exhibit recently ended, but it seems too cool not to mention: (Un)seen Sculptures, a mobile 3-D augmented reality art show staged in various locations, made digital works by Australian and international artists visible to anyone with an iPhone, Android or Nokia smartphone and an app called the Layar Reality Browser. Several projects, including Sea of Tweets, are connected to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Here’s how it it worked:

Once they have downloaded this app, people can simply open it up, search for “unseen sculptures,” select the layer set up for the show, then hold up their phones at the designated locations, and they will see 3D artworks. When these artworks are “touched,” further information about them will be revealed and other forms of interaction may be unlocked. [...] The pieces themselves will traverse a wide range of styles and subjects: anything from characters from a traditional Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet lost in the metropolis; to an infestation of psychotropic toads; to a singing virtual tree; to an 18th-century GPS device.

Here’s another one to check out: Occupation Forces, which enabled viewers to experience an alien invasion of public spaces. What I would have given to “see” that.

Wondering how it’s done? (Un)Seen Sculptures website has a DIY section that explains how to create your own mobile augmented reality art.

“It costs nothing to set up your own channel of works and display them, and there are plenty of online tools to help if you’re not au fait with the fiddly back end programming,” says new media artist Warren Armstrong, who curated (Un)Seen Sculptures.

Let us know if you plan a summer AR project, or have come across other apps that readers should know about.