October 18th

Today was the first meeting for my partner and I to begin brainstorming on our Interactive Exhibit Project. During this brainstorming session, we essentially attempted to get a better grasp of the assignment, as well as attempting to have a definitive direction to move on our project. We began by discussing possible exhibit ideas that we could do, deciding that we are going to attempt to create a “choose your own history adventure” exhibit. We will set up stations within a specific area and have multiple different pictures of historical events, with narratives below describing what is occurring in the picture. There will then be two covered cards underneath the description, which the patron can use to decide where they are going to go next. If they choose the correct event that happens next in the sequence, they will be able to continue on towards the end. If they are incorrect, they will either be redirected to the beginning, or on a path that has an incorrect outcome. The details of that part haven’t been figured out yet.

            Having a general idea of the kind of project that we would like to do, we then began to brainstorm ideas for the historical theme we could use. Two choices that we thought would work well were to incorporate major U.S. historical events, with Presidential Information. This way the exhibit should be able to be interacted with by the majority f people. A third choice we came up with but rejected was Hmong history. We rejected this idea because even knowledgeable participants may have no knowledge of many of the events. We are going to begin to gather information that we could use to create our plaques over the next couple of weeks, by first studying a timeline of U.S. historical events, and deciding which ones we feel that the general public would have knowledge of.

            We are undecided as of yet about the target audience. It will either be college students found on campus, or a more controlled setting such as a third grade class at Lakeshore Elementary School. Initially we had thought of performing the exhibit with my wife’s first grade class, but after speaking with her about it, she felt that the first graders wouldn’t be very good at this kind of activity. Whichever of our possible target audiences that we choose, we felt that having some form of incentive for a successful completion of the exhibit might be a good idea to help get people motivated. Something along the lines of a candy or treat.

            After about an hour of brainstorming, we walked over to Davies Center to look at a possible location to hold our exhibit. We then parted ways, and are going to continue meeting on Saturday afternoons, perhaps more often if needed.