onsider this: a successful museum exhibit draws a museum- goer's attention for only two minutes; many visitors spend even less time. A hands-on interactive exhibit, on the other hand, might encourage visitors to spend a great deal more time than two minutes exploring a math or science phenomena.

With this goal in mind, the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception in San Francisco, Calif., and The Concord Consortium have been awarded an 18-month grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an Electronic GuideBook that uses networked handheld computers. The project will be looking at ways of enhancing and extending a museum-goer's experience by outfitting that person with a handheld computer that will communicate with the Exploratorium's interactive exhibits over wireless networks.

Our goal is to extend the museum experience by giving visitors deeper access to the concepts embodied in an exhibit and connecting these phenomena with the guests' real-world experiences. A handheld computer or "electronic assistant" made available to museum guests before, during, and after a museum visit will add to an individual's museum experience.

The Electronic GuideBook will support just-in-time learning by making many exhibits far more interactive than possible without the handhelds. We envision a visit to the museum to be very different from what one might have experienced in the past. Come along as we show you how a visit to the Exploratorium by two groups could be different.

An hour after the doors open, a school class arrives, part of a field trip from a public high school 60 miles away. A family also arrives. Each of these groups has signed up to use the Exploratorium's new learning tool, the Electronic GuideBook.

Prior to their field trip, the kids had looked at the Exploratorium web site at school. Their 9th grade science teacher had led them in brainstorming questions about the electricity and magnetism phenomena they will study. Together they planned a visit to specific Exploraotrium exhibits that would help them explore these topics. The teacher has divided the class into teams to share their tasks.

The kids and their teacher are welcomed into the Learning Studio, a workshop adjacent to the exhibit floor that serves as a home base for the Electronic GuideBook visit. Here they are issued their handheld computers to use in teams. They discuss their questions and ideas with the Learning Studio Leader, who also shows them an overview of how to use the handheld devices. The teams map out their visit to the exhibits, and agree to rendezvous at the Learning Studio in 90 minutes.

The students have already studied the relationship between electricity and magnetism in class. They decide to use the handheld with data probes at the Generator Effect exhibit to measure the current produced when the coil of wire passes through the magnetic field. Looking at the graph of the data, one student asks, "How does the current depend on the speed of moving the coil? What would have happened if we had moved it slower?" While some students move on to the next exhibit, one curious student uses her handheld to peruse the exhibit information available on the network and discovers, in a section on the history of electricity, that scientists were puzzled by the same question over 100 years ago. A link to a nearby exhibit is proposed for further exploration.

The whole class returns to the Learning Studio to turn in their handheld devices and discuss what they found. Some participants gather at the tables, talking over what they have seen. Some head straight for the computer, where they can enter their name to see a detailed record of their visit in the form of a series of web pages of each exhibit visited. These web pages are created automatically with links to the graphs the museum guests created, background information about the phenomena they observed, and questions and ideas for further exploration. Some students are typing notes to accompany a picture they took of an exhibit. Others are digging into online materials about the properties of electricity or the discovery of magnetism.

The family's experience is slightly different. They have visited the Exploratorium before, but they left feeling a bit overwhelmed by the variety of exhibits. Now they want to focus their return visit on specific topics, and so they signed up the day before on the Web to use the Electronic GuideBook. In response to the resources they found at the web site, they began forming questions about what they wanted to see at the museum.

The family's approach to the museum is more open. They haven't decided on a specific plan, just the topics they want to learn more about. Upon arriving at the museum, they too start at the Learning Studio. The Learning Studio Leader talks with them about the exhibits they are about to explore and asks a few questions about their areas of interest, one of which is electricity.

In the electricity exhibit, their curiosity leads them to explore a particular exhibit in detail. Using their handheld computers, they capture the exhibit text and images for later viewing on the network. They also access - through the Electronic GuideBook menu - a set of additional materials that introduce them to the phenomena and principles demonstrated in the exhibit and a video clip of the exhibit designer discussing the ideas that resulted in the exhibit. A set of questions guides them to learn more at the exhibit.

Back at the Learning Studio the family returns their handheld devices and later, at home, uses the Internet to access the Exploratorium web site, where they access the online record of their visit. Seeing the record and the photos of themselves at the exhibits, they are reminded of several ideas they had at the museum, and they add annotations to the web pages. They also remember several questions that had not even emerged until they were on their way home. Following links to the rest of the Exploratorium's web resources, they discover mini-experiments they can try at home, background material on electricity and the history of its discovery and use.

As a result of their visit, both groups may discover answers to their questions, but perhaps they will form new questions to explore, whether at school, at home, or on a future museum visit.

This scenario is possible, but first we need the right handheld computer for the job. Although there have been significant developments in this area, the ideal system is not yet available. Our research will begin with an in-depth review of handheld and tablet computers that support wireless communication. Features we'd like to see in the ideal platform include:

• Small size: a child should be able to comfortably hold a computer in one hand, so that the free hand could either use a pen or fingertip to interact with the computer or the exhibit itself. A pen or touch-screen interface is a simple and direct operation on a handheld computer.
  
• 16-bit color screen: images can be a powerful way to both record and investigate the world around us. Having an excellent color screen will make the images displayed on the handheld that much more appealing and real.
  
• Infrared networking (IrDA): the handheld must be able to detect its location within the museum, in order to provide context-appropriate guidance. One simple method is to outfit all the pertinent exhibits with IrDA networking pods. That way, when a visitor walks up to an exhibit, all they need to do is point their handheld at one of the IrDA pods and the display will instantly update to reflect the options and information appropriate to that exhibit.
  
• Radio frequency wireless networking: this is not strictly necessary when the IrDA networking is working well. However, our goal is to support reflective conversations at other venues in the museum. The material viewed and collected should be available on the handheld while eating lunch at the museum cafeteria or otherwise away from the exhibits, in meeting rooms or classrooms, for instance. The best way to enable these conversations and extended investigations is to have the handheld always connected to a network that can provide this information.
  
• Multimedia capabilities: the handheld must have the capacity to represent audio, video, and animated information as well as still images. We will support visitors using exhibit cameras to take images. Supporting the collection of video and audio data would be equally valuable.

Stephen Bannasch is director of technology for The Concord Consortium.
stephen@concord.org

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