Visit at the Rotunda Museum - The Critique of Interactivity by Tadej Droljc

   The Rotunda Museum, also known as the William Smith Museum of Geology, has two different interactive applications. One is available on the three small independent touch screens while the second one is accessible through one larger touch screen. The application on the small screens is divided into two parts. One is a quiz like game about the sea erosion and the other is a newspaper article collage in the pdf format about the Holbeck Hall Hotel that partially fell into the sea in the 1993. The game and the article go well together since they both are about the soil creep and the sea erosion. The topic of both sub applications is probable not suitable for small children so the museum offers another application on the big touch screen that seems like an educational game for the youngest. But there is a slight issue with that.

   The main problem about the application on the big touch screen is that it is to high for very small children to reach. I think it should be position in a way that at least four year old kids could reach its entire surface. Therefore if one small child wants to play with it, somebody needs to lift him. That could be a problem if a child comes with its granny which is probably not a rare situation in a town like Scarborough. If we add to this another weakness of the game, which is that a user has no control over the time events that constitute the game, it seems even additionally wrong that the screen is not positioned lower. Very small children are probably the only clientele that has no need for exit or main menu buttons. Beside that the game itself, the esthetics and the animation is probably too simple to attract older children (adults included). Majority of the kids that can reach high enough to play that game probably has a need for higher level of interactivity and the feel of organicity. For instance if one decide to put 10 dinosaurs on the Yorkshire coast, the result is 10 exactly the same dinosaur pictures on the screen only scaled according to the location (near or further away) which gives a very artificial feel to the game. That looks especially wrong if user slides with the finger across the screen which just pastes a lot of equal images. Therefore this is a bad exploitation of the possibilities that that particular touch screen offers. There should be at least some different pictures for one plant or specie in the program that could be randomly selected when a user would place them in. 3D model of a landscape that one can rotate would be even a better option. On the other hand the educational value of the game is to small to compensate the lack of amusement.  

   The application on the small screen seems much more appropriate to me. The one who plays a quiz like game will probably learn more about the erosion as if one would only read an article about it. The game somehow "forces" you to think about the problems and possible solutions. The pdf like article collection is as well working fine because it doesn't bombard one with loads of information at one time. There are bits of interesting information that are exposed and with the accompanying pictures it may seduce many users to go to the last page. That might result in a situation where one will start to read an article or part of it while on the other hand, in the case of a text on the paper, that might not happen at all. Person could be discouraged from reading by the amount of text. The only potential weakness of that application is that the user can click only on arrows and menus although this may be the best solution for the that kind of an application.