Hanging out in the MERL

At Half-term, June 2012, we are just hanging around in the Museum of English Rural Life with iPads, Berkshire Farmer Books and the iMuse trolley. Visitors are trying bits of the trail, with labels fastened with soft tape to objects, QR codes and (a selected few) Widgit symbols, videos showing stuff working, extracts of the story being read, photos from the archives.

Children are borrowing the iPads to draw and take photos (and transform them optically). We’ve tweeted some as an easy way to save them. Interesting that we got a drawing of a ‘Tractor at Night’ – good to see an understanding of modern farming techniques in an 8 year old, though the ‘Farmer Pirates’ treasure map was an interesting mix of themes!

A family watched the video from the Amners Farm Lambing Sunday – though some turned away during the actual birth, one raised the subject of stillbirth which showed an encouraging understanding of the sometimes grim reality.

We also showed the Olympics Trail – the animations [story lines from two Reading schools as part of the Cultural Olympiad] went down very well, and did lead to discussion on javelin throwing and Greek boxing. Young children knew more about the street dancing moves than iMuse. Also brief iMuse visit to the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, Reading, revealed that the animator has now published the full thing which is great news. See Ure View Animating Ancient Greece on Youtube

MERL has a very relaxed area with toys, a rug to play on and comfortable seats. It’s a natural place to sit showing stuff on mobiles like the iPads with people dipping in to look at stuff or draw or talk. Not all museums have this though. iMuse will have to think about what/whether it could do in a more formal place.

Village Fete coming up 9 June. iMuse will report it here.

Olympic trail

We are working on a 5-stop (one for each day of the Ancient Olympics) trail in the Ure Museum of Classical Archaeology. Each stop will have one object associated with a particular day.

Material has been gathered from the Open University’s excellent Openlearn Olympics information.

Some of the same problems as in the Berkshire Farmer trail have been encountered, plus the added wrinkle that Openlearn uses Flash for its animations so we are unable to show these on an iPad.

Our urge to try a more ‘industry standards’ compliant tablet is great, but we probably do not have the manpower to support another tablet, and the iPad accessibility options are otherwise good.

We have been able to use the animations from the Reading schools/animator/Ure cultural olympiad project in the iPad version being tried over half term in the Ure Museum. The animator and the Museum have granted permission to use elsewhere but we await permission from funders (?) as use on other mobile devices would require publishing.

Berkshire farmer trail

Labels with QR codes and Widgit symbols are now tied to various objects in the Museum of English Rural Life with (soft) tape supplied by the Museum Conservator. We’ve started to let visitors try it for themselves on our iPad-on-a-trolley.

Video, especially of the thresher, was popular yesterday, as was breaking out to draw corn and ‘countryside’ on the iPad and take transformed photos.

Maybe the trail should take the visitor straight to a video clip before offering other options?

Some visitors who are not iPad-users find the concept of ‘tap’ [the buttons] don’t ‘push’ (as you would with an ordinary button) difficult. Not being able to play a video as soon as a QR code is scanned (for example) is nasty and seems to be an iPad ‘quirk’ which has no (believable-rational) explanation. The Kiosk Pro app has been useful to run demos of the trail where no wi-fi or wireless signal is available (especially good for Country Fayre in a marquee) but of course we need a signal when, say, a Youtube video forms part of the trail. If the iPad is online, the app is not ‘allowed’ (?) to use the camera.

Odd ‘features’ like this make it difficult to produce a really sound (ergonomically) ‘webapp’. It may just be impossible to have a perfect solution for loaned-out iPads. The situation is different with the users’ own devices of course – they will know how to tap/scroll etc and the museum will not have to worry about the visitors accessing other sites on the web – it will be up to the visitor.

We have two versions of the ‘app’. One for each stop on the trail, intended for use by a visitor standing in front of an object, and with access to the QR code. The other which can be used ‘standalone’ with arrow keys to take you from one stop to the next.

Not just a Berkshire Farmer trail

Tweet a sheep

Mondrian-on-iPad inspiring bunting design for MERL Fete, 9 June, Reading
More sheep tweeted from the Young Farmers’ Club Berkshire Country Show, Englefield Estate, Nr Reading, 27 May 2012. And our intrepid iPad-wearing camera team took these photos:

Visitors to MERL’s stand at Lambing Sunday, Amner’s Farm, near Reading, Berkshire, UK, 29 April 2012 made their own sheep and took photos of real ones, and some very new lambs, with iMuse iPads.

Make-a-sheep flock

We tweeted some @imuse_programme and put them in our sheep gallery alongside other pictures from the MERL.
See Tweet-a-Sheep’s set of photos on Flickr.






See Loren’s photos of lambs here.
And we made a video of a lamb being born.

And here it is being watched – MERL and iMuse ‘Cultivating knowledge’!

More experiences with touch screens and QR codes

We’ve found that some people can have difficulty making touchscreens work. There can also be problems with lining-up the camera  on a smartphone or iPad with a QRcode. A previous blog, http://imusenews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/initial-experiences-with-touch-screens.html, described these problems.

We have a bit more experience, from both visitors and volunteers/staff at our iMuse partner museum and from more elderly and partially-sighted (potential) users elsewhere.

First, on the touchscreen, it seems some people just do not have whatever the right ‘chemistry’ or whatever is needed on their fingertips to get a screen to react. Here is a 92 year old, who can see well enough to touch an icon on an iPad 2, and who is proficient with similar manual tasks such as typing. Despite help, the iPad just did not react at all to his touch. Interestingly, an attempt on a subsequent visit, this time with the new iPad, presented no problems at all and touching, swiping and pinching were all fine.

A staff member at the museum described a similar touch problem with an iPhone, which would not react at all. However, trying our new iPad was fine. Now, they had just come from a shopping trip during which they’d tried out some hand creams. Pure speculation, but is there a connection? One of our volunteers (who wishes to remain anonymous due to this unsavoury habit) confesses to licking her fingers before using a screen that isn’t reacting (and sometimes feels this helps also on a laptop tablet-mouse). Is this real or the start of a new urban myth? What about the weather? Is a very dry day unhelpful?

A museum volunteer just could not get a ‘touch’ on the iPad to work but there could be a reaction to movement – the whole screen in an application shifting. This can be disturbing for people not used to it –  they can even think they have ‘broken’ something. We have had this ‘fear’ reaction also from someone in their 70s who is a long standing computer-user, but used to the more mechanical ‘feel’ and reaction of a keyboard and mouse-click.

Earlier, we found another 92-year old felt reasonably comfortable with trying out Historypin (which involves touching a map) on an iPad 2, saying she ‘would enjoy doing this’, but again there could be unexpected movement as the user leaves their finger on the screen, or inadvertently touches it, for example while passing the iPad to a companion. For now, we are locking the screen in the trial ‘apps’ but this isn’t ideal as some of the usefulness of the iPad (e.g. pinching to increase the size of photos to see more detail of a museum object, or as an aid to those with failing sight) is lost.

The iPad can also be awkward, and rather heavy for someone with weak wrists to hold. Without any sort of extra case it can feel a bit hard and ‘slippery’. We also found during the Project Berkshire experience in the shopping mall that some people preferred to use the iPad mounted in a box to do the drawing activity, somehow maybe it felt more ‘secure’? For its use as a QRcode reader, mounted for example on our trolley for a museum visitor to wheel around (http://imusenews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/great-reading-cheese-mystery-part-4.html) we have been thinking of moving from the amateur-looking sticky tape and cardboard box to a custom-built wooden box [as befits a Rural Life museum].

This would however increase the weight which may not help more frail users when using it say at home. This is a consideration for our new project, using the iPad and music, where the iPad will be used in partially or totally ‘uncontrolled’ environments in a care home or in the user’s own home. Perhaps again, using it on an adjustable trolley/table rather than handheld might be the way forward? It would give the user one less thing to worry about. Have other projects had experience with this elsewhere?

Using the iPad in a box with QRcodes on movable labels has proved extremely reliable for all visitors to our mini trails. In fact, children enjoyed having to control sliding the label under the camera until the iPad ‘beeped’ and put them online. However, for a partially-sighted user who tried out the box, this lining-up proved a bit problematic, and we have not yet had any user with more difficulties with hand-control try it. Our idea at the moment is to use reasonably thick card for the labels, to give stiffness, and to provide some sort of raised guide rails to help line up the label as it is slid into the box. We’ll do some further testing with users and report back!

The Great Fire Engine Mystery – the story

It’s Good Friday – the one day in the year that the workers in the village have as holiday.

But, Chief Engineer Rab Bit and his team have to test the fire engine.

Disaster strikes as Rab is walking to the village through the woods. He steps on a rabbit trap. He drops his notebook. He manages to escape but his leg is broken. He can’t organise the fire engine test.

His team do their best.

They wheel the fire engine down to the village pond. They put one end of a hose in the water. They hold the end of the other hose up towards the trees. They start pumping. Everyone comes to watch.

A great cheer goes up as the water gets to the top of the trees. The fire engine is working.

But suddenly they hear a scream. Mummy Duck comes running up. Duckling is missing. One minute he was taking his first swim in the pond. The next he was nowhere to be seen.

Whatever happened? And where is Duckling?

Crack Reading detectives are called in to look at the evidence.


Some children by the pond thought they saw something fly past. Luckily one of them has taken a video on her phone. The detectives have a good look at it.



Is that Duckling zooming past? It can’t be. Duckling can’t fly yet. He was only just learning to swim.

The detectives find out how the fire engine works.

Was Duckling sucked up by the fire engine? But that should be impossible. A fire strainer on the end of the hose would have stopped anything being sucked up.

They find Rab Bit’s notebook where he’d dropped it by the rabbit trap. He had made a note to take the fire strainer with him.

The detectives hunt for the fire strainer. It looks very new and completely unused.

The detectives have discovered that the team forgot all about the fire strainer. Duckling must have been sucked up by the fire engine and shot out of the other end towards the trees.

They hunted high and low. Eventually they found Duckling, looking very angry, high up in a tree.

Mummy Duck was very happy.

The fire team were rather embarrassed but they never forgot the fire strainer again.

Chief Engineer Rab Bit was so grateful that he gave the detectives a medal and tickets to watch his favourite film, Tilley and the Fire Engines (1911).

…………
The not-so-Alternate Reality

Built in 1839, the fire engine at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, UK was in service for over a century. It was tested on Good Fridays as that was the only day, apart from Sundays, that the people in the Norfolk village did not have to work. Testing it was a spectacle that everyone came out to view.

Privy photo courtesy the Ramsey Rural Museum Cambs

A Chief Engineer and two other men were paid a small amount to tend the engine which was last used on a call to a privy fire in 1930.


The village decided it was too expensive to keep the fire engine in the 1930s but during the Second World War it was positioned by a farm pond in case incendiary bombs hit the hay ricks.

Further information about the fire engine is in the Museum of English Rural Life catalogue
http://www.reading.ac.uk/adlib/dispatcher.aspx?action=search&database=ChoiceCollect&search=object_number=’51/410′

Just as we were setting-up the trail in the Museum, Fred the Conservator showed us a wonderful Huntley & Palmer biscuit tin. Dating from the 1890s, the tin depicts a steam-driven fire-engine drawn by two horses, with lively scenes of fire fighting. Fred kindly put it in the horse-vet display case near the fire-engine. Fantastic real-time museum display design! Huntley & Palmers was a central part of Reading life in the 19th and 20th centuries, and Alfred Palmer built ‘East Thorpe’ (Later St Andrews Hall) which now houses the Museum’s extensive archives.

Fred also found a video showing a fire engine like the one in the MERL being pulled by a horse in the Netherlands.http://www.brandweerevenementen.nl/Videos/MOV02419.MPG

and there’s another Tilley engine being demonstrated in New Zealand at http://youtu.be/2Ed39zcO84Y

Getting to grips with the heritage trail

 iMuse in Reading is creating a small exhibition to accompany The Friends’ London Road Campus Heritage Trail (Sunday 25 March 2012 – all welcome). After a morning going through the photos we already have from The Friends’ and Women’s Club previous mini exhibitions plus those in the UMASCS (University Museum and Archives and Special Collections Services) archive at the Museum, we had to check out where a couple of them were actually taken

(original (c) University of Reading)

Here the correct lodge is pinned down through its unusual decoration. Another photo, claimed to be from Shinfield on an official University postcard (not the Museum’s fault!), was found to come from the old Dairy immediately outside the Museum building itself. Verified by counting bricks and position of drainpipes. A good mark for iMuse’s heritage sleuthing if not a very glamorous task.

Now we have to decide how to display – on separate exhibition boards and/or overlaid on the diagram of the new use for the site and/or on a diagram of the old site layout and/or via Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Historypin. How best to arrange for display on iPads or visitors’ phones? How much text/audio to add? Should we trial doing ‘proper’ audio descriptions? How to keep the photos for another time?

What will work best in the reception area for the Sunday event? Will the University Court the next day be in the same place? How can we support the lightweight, cardboard display as the walls aren’t totally flat (there’s a piece of panelling on one, window halfway up on the other).

For an IT based programme, iMuse people are spending a lot of time with double-sided sticky-tape and paper…here printing out the basic photos for the exhibition… and it went 3D when the iMuse trolley was delivered – flatpacked.

Next week we’ll get back to digital….

How many women does it take to assemble a flatpack? It was the third one who cracked and asked a man for a set of screwdrivers…

What are we all here for anyway? – Part 2

What’s imuse trying to achieve? Part 1 is at http://www.aact.org.uk/imuse.php. Here’s some more thoughts.

We picked up interesting ideas from Museum Computer Network conference, Atlanta, November 2011 especially from Nettrice’s workshop on Alternate Reality Games – ways of encouraging visitors and museum interaction. Some of those methods were used in the mini [cheese and cheesey] ARG at half-term.

Now we have the book Museums at Play – Games, Interaction and Learning (ed Beale, Museumsetc, 2011). As we look more closely at what we are trying to achieve, it seems worth jotting down bits as we go along so we remember them. The very first sentence was worth the expense! It starts

      ‘Interactivity, curiosity, challenge, cooperation, choice, creativity, discovery, failure’

That sums up (rather more succinctly than in http://www.aact.org.uk/imuse.php) what imuse is trying to enable.

OK, we are working within some definite constraints. imuse is a project being run by a tiny charity – we are not ourselves a museum. The Charity’s aim is to find ways that inclusion can be increased for those with communications disabilities using IT [our Charity’s strapline is ‘IT helping inclusion’]. imuse is exploring systems that enable ‘interactivity, curiosity, challenge, cooperation, choice, creativity, discovery, failure [well, and success!]’ in the context of: small and moderate sized museums that don’t have dedicated IT teams or much (if any) spare cash for trying new things or buying equipment.

Our plan (to 1Q13) is to try out ideas in ‘several’ (currently defined as ‘three’) museums. If things look promising (i.e inclusion increased) we aim to explore the possibility for setting up a sustainable advisory service.

We are an ‘infrastructure’ project. That is, we look at how museums and their visitors can put in place systems which aid inclusion, particularly using IT. It is then up to the museums and visitors how they use those systems towards their own aims. Taking the analogy for physical access, a consultant may advise a museum on where to put lifts, toilets, the height of the reception desk, space around objects. The consultant will have done a good job if more people can get into  and move around the museum. Why the visitor wants to do this and why the museum wants them to do it are different matters, will change over time way after the consultant has gone and will have many facets.

For example, one visitor may want to bring her grandchildren somewhere fun for a holiday outing where they can do things together, another may want to study a specific museum collection. The museum may have funding to help local schools with part of the national curriculum, or  have an aim to increase volunteering. The access consultant may have been apprised of some of these at the start of his project, but cannot know them all because things change. Those outcomes are not his speciality. Getting people in and moving around is. After that it’s up to visitors and the museum whether they use the systems for having fun, running a cocktail reception, formal learning, somewhere to go on a wet Sunday.

The Great Reading Cheese Mystery – Part 5 more observations from half-term

Lorna noted these comments made during the Great Reading Cheese Mystery trial at the Museum of English Rural Life.

“best trail I’ve ever done at a museum”

“it was really fun and I liked it a lot” (6 year old)

“it was fun but someone was sitting on the basket at clue 6”

“it was fun but hard to find the information” -older girl 11/12ish

“that was really, really good fun”

“that was just excellent”

And here are some observations:

– one person did the entire trail without returning to scan the clues (this was an adult who said they had a child, although the child wasn’t actually seen at any point)

– observation from adult who took two children round separately (i.e. adult went round trail twice) commented that they ‘got bored of reading the parents’ sheet and gave up reading it after struggling through the first paragraph.’ they felt ‘it took the enjoyment away from the trail’ and that they ‘enjoyed and learnt a lot more from just reading and using the detectives report to communicate with the children’. [Further observation from Annette – most parents seemed to have enough to cope with without taking a parents’ sheet. We printed 25 and probably got rid of no more than a dozen (though at least 84 adults took children round. The more useful place for them was probably for those who stayed to talk further about Reading and cheese – not many but enough to make it worthwhile – though most times I forgot there was a sheet they might find interesting post the trail. Speculating I would say the sheet looked too serious and ‘school like’ for what was meant to be a fun, shared half term activity encouraging communication].

– after a while clues began to curl and the inigma machine failed to recognise them

– some clues were found ripped up [very carefully, along the dividing lines and put back in the clue basket – making it difficult to see in passing that the stock of clues was running low. This was next to the tinies’ model farm play-area so may have been a 2 year old vandal from there rather than a registered detective. Annette has kept the one that was actually chewed as a souvenir].

– as far as our records go, only one parent-child set started the trail but did not finish it – in fact stopped after going to the first clue site, saying the game was too difficult for the 6 year old and the child did not want to continue. More support was offered but not accepted.

– a parent and child were doing the rat trail and came and asked if I knew where the last rat was. I explained that Judith at the desk had a help sheet. As Judith was on the phone and there was a slight queue. I offered to have a look at their clipboard and see if I could remember where the last one they were looking for was. This led to me getting the rat trail up on the iPad [this is on the Open University’s free Our Story app] and talking the child through each slide on there, to see if they had found the rat pictured. This helped them find the rat they had missed, without being too obvious about where it was. They then went off to find said rat and later when undertaking the cheese mystery, thanked me for the help in finding it. Not strictly cheese mystery but I thought it was a good thing to note and they seemed to quite enjoy looking at the rats on the iPad. They also got correct names for objects of where the rats where hidden when going through them on the iPad. (as in the object names of where they found the rats were slightly incorrect in the first instance)

–  there seem to be 2 ways of viewing the Mystery – one as a quest and other as getting round the museum. A lot of children saw it as a quest-like adventure whereas for parents/grandparents etc that went round with younger ones, it was more of a different way of getting around the museum. [we had deliberately designed it so the groups had to go through a substantial part of the museum for three clues, and for another had to go in the opposite direction to the temporary exhibition which people often said they had not realised was there].

– cheese making part of the trail – a lot of people missed the full content of this part of the trail and the detectives’ report came to the bottom of the page part way through and therefore this led to them missing the need to turn over the page. Maybe a P.T.O would have been helpful here [we tried to get more of a ‘flow’ about the actual cheese making process at one clue stop. This meant changing gear to look at 3 objects and as it coincided with having to turn the page on the detective report, a lot did not manage to do all of this. By contrast, a few families looked really closely, lead poisoning being a topic which one mother and child had discussed and the child really interested in e.g.].

– one child asked to do it again – completed it very quickly

– ‘but we can find it’ – two girls [?] when asked if they knew what a milk float was – a positive can-do attitude as despite saying no they didn’t know what it was they weren’t fazed at all and declared as it says that ‘we can find it!’

– Lady (grandparent) was going to tell the story of smelling the cheese to others as she found it very humorous and obviously a must-tell to her friends!

– Reading cheese press – thought it was from Dorset [it was – where it was made. Quite a lot of people didn’t take the extra step to read the old museum label to find where it had been used. – and did a label disappear during the week? This was another ‘change of gear’ in terms of observation which many didn’t manage]

The Great Reading Cheese Mystery additional notes

As one of the project aims is to encourage people to learn more about their heritage, the project worked on creating a mini Alternate Reality Game aimed at children aged 6- 13 visiting the MERL during the February half-term.

A topic was selected that incorporated the fact that the building next door to the MERL was once a dairy used by the British Dairy Institute, an associate of the old pre-university college. Objects from the Institute and the University are in the MERL, which includes a particularly extensive collection of objects related to butter-making. 

A storyline was then formed, using objects in the MERL that had local dairy connections, for example a milk float and a cheese press.

The MERL had advertised its activities for the half-term week as suitable for children aged 6+. So it was decided to aim for the same age range.

The actual mystery game itself involved children coming along to the ‘forensic lab’, a table with iPads, clipboards, clues and volunteer helpers known as the ‘lab assistants’. Here the children were signed up as detectives, which involved them scanning an ID card which had a QR code on it. The cards and also later clues, were scanned via the i-nigma machine (an iPad secured in a box, on a table) to discover the child’s detective ID number. From there they were given their first clue (a slip of paper with a QR Code on), which was again scanned by the iPad to reveal the location of the next clue. At each trail stop where the clues were collected, the children were asked to answer a question about the objects nearby, which were of course related to the cheese making theme of the mystery. Each clue had to be brought back to the lab and i-nigma machine for scanning, to reveal information about the location of the following clue. The final question asked the young detectives to smell a block of smelly cheese and identify which cheese they thought it was. They were then rewarded with a certificate of appreciation for their help in solving the mystery.