Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.15.11 | On a recent visit to The New York Hall of Science, the hands-on kids’ museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, I checked out the Distorted Room, an installation that uses forced perspective to make a visitor look bigger or smaller depending on where he or she stands.

Seeing myself grow and shrink was a strange experience, but from the moment I arrived, I knew this would be a day full of odd sights and new encounters.

Next, I decided to check out the Anatomy of a Plant, where I could enter a giant flower to see how it works from the inside. Rather than walk across the museum, which, to be honest, felt like a sprawling, endless space on this sunny Saturday afternoon, I lifted myself off the ground and passed through walls and floors like a ghost. As I zoomed past dozens of exhibits on environmental topics such as climate change and biodiversity, I reminded myself to fly back later, or at the very least, teleport.

I don’t usually make a habit of defying the laws of gravity, especially in museums, but this was no ordinary visit. While I was physically at the New York Hall of Science, I was also there virtually, buzzing about in the form of an avatar in the The Virtual Hall of Science, a playful, digital teaching environment created by the New York Hall of Science and Greater Southern Tier BOCES SciCentr. The NYHS is also a member of the New Youth City Learning Network, a group of cultural organizations in New York City working together to create and connect learning opportunities for city youth.

While the museum offers dozens of exhibitions that enlighten and entertain thousands of kids each month, the Virtual Hall of Science, which has the feel of an immersive world like popular online game/social network Second Life, has the potential to extend those lessons well beyond the museum’s brick-and-mortar walls and reach students all over the world.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the virtual hall, built with Active Worlds software, has been in development for nearly two years. Construction is ongoing given that one of the blessings (or curses) of a digital-only world is that it can be altered indefinitely without costly land acquisitions and complicated building permits.

As the students-turned-museum builders, each of whom came from New York-area middle and high schools, collaborated on the space and filled it with interactive installations, they bolstered their communication and team-working abilities along with their illustration and programming skills. In time, the Virtual Hall of Science will serve as an interactive environment where students can go on virtual field trips as easily as logging into their computers—no bag lunch or permission slips required.

As Chris Lawrence, director of formal and informal teaching and learning at NYHS explains it, the Virtual Hall of Science shares many goals with the actual museum, including student empowerment through teaching. (Since the time of this reporting, Lawrence has become director of the New Youth City Learning Network.) On any given day, visitors to the brick-and-mortar Hall of Science can have their questions answered by red-apron-wearing “Explainers,” high school student interns or paid guides. Many of these students begin as interns and are trained to become part-time museum staffers.

The fluid nature of the Virtual Hall of Science allows students, drawn mostly from the museum’s pool of Explainers, to try on any number of hats along with those red aprons: They can act as guides, curators, diorama designers, digital art installers, or almost anything else they can imagine.

The students working on the virtual museum collaborated for months via Remix World, the social networking site of the Digital Youth Network, a digital literacy program that creates opportunities for youth to engage in learning environments both in and out of school. Decisions were made collectively, with students debating all aspects of their installations and lesson plans. They used Google SketchUp, a free 3-D rendering program, to post sketches or ideas, and older students advised the younger ones.

“This program has reached anyone from fifth grade to 12th grade,” Lawrence explains. “Sometimes we’ll have the high school kids who are on staff look at what the middle school kids have started and they’ll take elements of it and improve it, give it a facelift. They have sort of curatorial power over that.”

The beauty of the Virtual Hall, according to Ray Ferrer, a curriculum developer on the project, lies in the fact that all aspects—from creation to content—function as a game and a learning opportunity. 

“The high schoolers that we work with will design an exhibit and really think about the accuracy of the content,” he says.

That means nailing down facts like weather patterns and flora and fauna in various biomes, for example, but they also do their best to create a cool interface.

“They’ll think about the user experience, how you flow through the exhibit,” Ferrrer adds.

One of those exhibits is a space dedicated to light and colors, which looks like a disco, replete with a prism demonstration that recalls the famous rainbow cover of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

As she floats her own avatar around the brightly colored space, Rebecca, a 16-year-old junior at St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset, Long Island, explained how she and two other students attempted to balance something educational and visually engaging: “We tried to create a level of interaction, but mostly we tried to make it aesthetically pleasing. Our strength here is our colors.”

Rebecca estimates it took her and her team about 50 hours to create their environment. As she taught herself about prisms and the color spectrum in order to curate her virtual museum space, Rebecca’s classroom curriculum nicely complemented the extracurricular project.

“When we first began building it, I didn’t know too much about it,” she says of her chosen area of research. “But when we got into the middle of it, I learned about it in physics class. So, I was able to incorporate my knowledge from class into the project.”

Georgette Williams, NYHS’s coordinator of out of school time learning, says that the overlaps between students’ exhibitions and their classroom work is not built into the project, but is a welcome occurrence.

“We decided pretty early in the project to let them develop exhibits based on their own interests with very little interference from us,” she says. “We felt that would keep them interested and focused during the entire process.”

Rebecca’s enthusiasm, and those of her fellow virtual curators, impressed Ferrer, who found that some students could intuit things he struggled with on his own, such as 3-D modeling.

“Some of them, we just showed them basics and they took off from that,” says Ferrer.

You can see this innate understanding of the medium in their rooms, which feel like a video game environment but are dense with educational signposts and playful, interactive widgets and games.

That combination of learning and play is a natural for students, according to the educators behind the Virtual Hall. As Williams, who went from being a teenage Explainer to a museum coordinator working closely with the next generation of student curators and builders, marvels, “Some kids were experts and surpassed me in ways. I guess it’s the same way where my mom is like, ‘How do you do the email?’”

Wait ‘til they show us how to fly.