Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums takes
the reader behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural
History innovates visitor digital engagement, highlighting design
techniques used both there and at museums around the world. Based on the
author's six years at the landmark institution that inspired the Night
at the Museum franchise, the book introduces The Six Tools of Digital
Design - user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative
design, youth collaboration, and teaming up - then applies them through
case studies across a range of topics: Combining digital experience
design with physical museum assets in a guided format, featuring Crime
Scene Neanderthal (CSN), a youth co-designed and facilitated in-Hall
experience that invited museum visitors to use a mobile app and other
tools to investigate a science-based mystery. Game-based learning,
featuring three case: a tabletop games (Pterosaurs: The Card Game),
mobile games (Playing with Dinos), and commercial off-the-shelf games
(Minecraft). Mobile augmented reality games, featuring MicroRangers,
which used AR to invite visitors to shrink to microscopic size and
explore the Museum to combat threats to global biodiversity. XR
experience design, featuring case studies about 360 videos on
paleontology and virtual reality projects about ocean life. Science
visualizations, featuring Galactic Golf, an astro-visualization that
addressed the topics of mass and gravity through a round of mixed
reality Martian golf; interactive science visualizations that invited
visitors to hold CT-scans of bat skulls in their hand; and Finding
Flamingos, a youth program focused on how Conservation Biologists
protect endangered flamingos through GIS mapping and predictions
software. In addition, the book explores related topics at institutions
in Greece and France, and from Washington, D.C. to California.