Understanding Parent-Child Sensemaking around Interactive Museum Exhibits

Spark is an interactive museum exhibit designed to facilitate learning about basic concepts of electrical circuits. Visitors can make circuits on an interactive tabletop and observe a simulation of electrons flowing through the circuit. To understand parent-child sensemaking while engaged with Spark, we tested four different versions of the exhibit with 80 parent-child dyads at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In this paper, we present our preliminary analysis of different types of talk that families use to predict the behavior of circuits. We are in the process of creating a coding scheme to characterize the elements of our design that prompt deep, meaningful engagement between family visitors, which will help us develop principles for designing interactive exhibits that encourage rich sensemaking.