Pit a pat: design for support learning exhibitions

Exhibitions at a scientific museum are usually difficult for ordinary school pupils. To improve the issues of current explanation systems, we use personal data assistant (PDA) devices. Recent PDAs have enough functionality for school children to interactively, individually, and easily learn about scientific displays at a museum. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of visual interfaces for PDAs for such a learning system. The system aims at letting elementary and junior high school children learn scientific knowledge without tears, when they walk around the museum displays. Experiments using the prototype system implemented in Flash/MX software toolkit have suggested the effectiveness on the performance and functionality of the proposed method.