Creating a tool for developing deep learning interactions in exhibitions
CLIENT
Museum of Science, Boston
PROJECT
Productive Struggle 2018-2020
ROLE
Senior Exhibit Designer
What is Productive Struggle?
Productive Struggle is what happens when, as a learner, you hit a moment of discomfort during an activity, but with support around you, you are able to persist through that discomfort into resolution. The challenge and reward of encountering discomfort and persisting through it create a memorable engagement, where the lesson is more easily recalled by the learner afterward.
The refurbishments
The first challenge was to understand the methodology of HOW to create an experience in an informal learning setting that elicits the phenomenon of Productive Struggle.
This project involved a team that included emotion scientists, researchers, and designers and iterated design and research through two component refurbishments:
One is a full-body control experience.
The other is a computer-based Natural History classifying an experience.
In both cases, the original activity did not elicit productive struggle in the learner. In both refurbishments, we found that forcing the learner to commit to something at the start, adding supports seamlessly into the iterative interaction, and rewarding the learner with a clear success when achieved were key to eliciting productive struggle.
Prototype
Rendering
Design
Computer-based Natural History Classification Experience
Full-body Control Experience
Prototype
Rendering
Design
Framework
From these two disparate designs, we came up with a framework and theories on why the tactics we used in the first two activities worked. We iterated the framework alongside iterating the refurbishments; updating the framework as we understood more about how individual strategies result in emotional response.
Our framework was presented to the Informal Science Learning community in the Spring of 2020 via a series of webinars, and the final book and framework were published in the Winter of 2022.
Creating a Productive Struggle Exhibit
The third experience we created from scratch, using a theme and our framework to guide us in our design. We chose a physical science exhibit on Air as our subject. Using our guidelines, we made a challenge course to move ping pong balls through, using principles of air flow. It was the easiest, fastest, most fun, and most successful of the three exhibits created during this project.
