Black Holes Traveling Exhibition: This Time, It's Personal.

How can you make a topic as abstract as black holes seem relevant to the life of the average museum visitor? In 2009, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics developed a 2500 square foot interactive museum exhibition, "Black Holes: Space Warps & Time Twists,” with funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA. The exhibition has been visited by more than a quarter million museum-goers, and is about to open in its sixth venue at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego, California. We have found that encouraging visitors to adopt a custom black hole explorer's identity can help to make the science of black holes more accessible and meaningful. The Black Holes exhibition uses networked exhibit technology that serves to personalize the visitor experience, to support learning over time including beyond the gallery, and to provide a rich quantitative source of embedded evaluation data. Visitors entering the exhibition create their own bar-coded "Black Holes Explorer's Card” which they use throughout the exhibition to collect and record images, movies, their own predictions and conclusions, and other black hole artifacts. This digital database of personal discoveries grows as visitors navigate through the gallery, and an automated web-content authoring system creates a personalized online journal of their experience that they can access once they get home. We report here on new intriguing results gathered from data generated by 112,000 visitors across five different venues. For example, an initial review of the data reveals correlations between visitors’ black hole explorer identity choices and their engagement with the exhibition. We will also discuss correlations between learning gains and personalization.