Designing a History Museum Based Outreach Program with Digital Content

This study expands on the concept of outreach programs: museum initiatives that look for ways to reach and share knowledge outside their installations, often to schools. We aim to study approaches for the development of content for a history museum outreach program using digital technologies. The significance of this lies in investigating ways to bring the knowledge of the museum to schools that cannot have easy access to them.

Three different content approaches were developed and tested. The first was an Assemblable walls exhibition, consisting of a modular structure in which three different exhibition methods were presented: object, video and interactive. Second, was a Hands-on interactive exhibition, consisting of a portable system that includes digital and analogue activities in an application developed for a smart projector. Lastly, the third approach was an interactive experience, which incorporated the various approaches tested previously and expanded upon them.

In our conclusions, we stress the significance of this research regarding offering museum content to schools without easy access and offer a list of suggestions based on our findings that museum curators could follow when considering the development of an outreach program with digital content.