Three Drops Evaluation

Report date: January, 2008

Overview

Evaluation Title:

Date of report:

01/2008

Contact:

joycem [1]

Permissions

[2]
Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

General Description:

A formative evaluation was conducted on Three Drops, an Immersive Digital Interactive (IDI), that allows visitors to interact with simulations of water at different size scales where different physical forces dominate. This evaluation revisits the exhibit after changes were made to address issues identified in the first series of formatives.

Major Findings:

• Overall, Three Drops was easy to use and visitors reported enjoying using the exhibit.
• However, the nanoscale portion of the IDI was the least likely used (66%) and seemed the most difficult to figure out.
• Only about half of the visitors saw all three parts of the exhibit. Consequently, only they had an opportunity to compare the macro, micro and nanoscale and induce that different forces dominate at different size scales.
• Despite having a video or a static label that articulated the main message of the piece, a minority of visitors (33%) reported thinking that Three Drops was about how the very small behaves and even fewer thought its main message was about the different forces at play at different size scales. Some people simply did not look at the video or label. Of the other 65%, some of these visitors were more interested in finding out what to do and not what is the exhibit about from the video or label.

Categorize

Evaluation type:

formative/remedial
public

Type of product(s) studied:

Exhibit

Method(s) of data collection:

interviews
observations

Resources

Documents:

three_drops.pdf [3]

Author(s):

Joyce Ma

Associated product(s):

Three Drops [4]