At the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, I was able to create new program activities. I get really excited about animal bones. When my supervisor cleaned out the public lab, I found a large amount of bones in the reference collection. The reference collection is objects which are not archaeological artifacts in nature, but are rather there to aid in identifying unknown incoming deposits. As such, they were appropriate to use for educational programming.
I began with skulls and jaw bones, as these were the easiest to identify. I am not an expert in archaeozoology, so I had to go with something that I could identify as well.
I began with going through professional diagnostic tools. I knew from other research that I have done, that a dichotomous key would likely be the easiest to implement. Dichotomous keys ask the users a series of questions, with two answers. Based on those answers, it directs you to further questions until it narrows it down to a final answer. It is like a choose-your-own-adventure-game but for identification.
The first iteration i did, I made a simplified dichotomous key that focused on the skulls and jaw bones we had at the museum, rather than needing to be comprehensive. The results were mixed. I found a few students were super into the process and were really dedicated to following it through. They also found a few errors in my key. The majority of students though, skipped to the last questions and based on the options, just guessed what the skulls could be.
I wanted to make the process more engaging, so I decided to try to utilize the education Ipads that the museum had. As my coding ability is limited, I went with Scratch. We debuted this program at Science Rendezvous, a drop in event with over 4000 participants. Our booth saw around a third of those numbers.
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/833362180/
What I liked about Scratch:
Part of the reason I really wanted a digital version was because I wanted to control which questions they saw, so they couldn’t just see all the answers at once. With this scratch program, I could control which question appeared based on the previous answer.
I had a really amazing moment with one summer camper. He had been difficult to engage with that whole week. When I introduced this program he was very excited because he had used Scratch before and he really wanted to see the coding I had used behind the program. It was really neat to see him excited not only about the content of the program but also in the delivery method.
Limitations of Scratch:
Even with the images and my effort to remove technical language, the program wasn’t something younger children could follow by themselves. Overall, teenagers could generally go through it without help, but Junior Highs really did need you to walk them through it. On the bright side, if I was there to assist, I was able to successfully walk several children under 10 through the program, so with assistance, it is child friendly.
I found the biggest barrier to the program looking professional was my ability to control the graphics. I think if I had more time to play with Canva, I could have incorporated more Canva elements into the background which would have resulted in a more polished look.
Scratch does require you to have a coder’s ‘mindset’. While you do not need to know language or follow brackets, you do have to be able to think in terms of coding logic. While I do believe this can be learned, it would be a significant hurdle for someone with no coding logic background. For full disclosure, I have has two years of highschool computer science, using scratch and then Javascript and I have dabbled in HTML in my spare time.
