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null (Ed.)Science museums are often interactive spaces where a variety of visitors engage with exhibits in diverse ways. While trying to support participants? behavior in ways that make intuitive sense for these behaviors in a museum context, these exhibits need to support interests and participation in forms that are meaningfully diverse - to make domains accessible to learners belonging to groups minoritized in those domains. In this paper, we present an interactive computational thinking exhibit designed to foster a multiplicity of goals and participatory behaviors. We also present preliminary analysis on how we can use play data to delineate the pursuit of different goals mediated through different pursuits. We also find care to be a uniquely valuable aesthetic motivator in gameplay, often overlooked in common design frameworks - with potential to expand perspectives on computing and combat inequity among computing learners.more » « less
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This paper describes the design of a collaborative game, called Rainbow Agents, that has been created to promote computational literacy through play. In Rainbow Agents, players engage directly with computational concepts by programming agents to plant and maintain a shared garden space. Rainbow Agents was designed to encourage collaborative play and shared sense-making from groups who are typically underrepresented in computer science. In this paper, we discuss how that design goal informed the mechanics of the game, and how each of those mechanics affords different goal alignments towards gameplay (e.g. competitive versus collaborative). We apply this framework using a case from an early implementation, describing how player goal alignments towards the game changed within the course of a single play session. We conclude by discussing avenues of future work as we begin data collection in two heavily diverse science museum locations.more » « less
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Immersive open-ended museum exhibits promote ludic engagement and can be a powerful draw for visitors, but these qualities may also make learning more challenging. We describe our efforts to help visitors engage more deeply with an interactive exhibit's content by giving them access to visualizations of data skimmed from their use of the exhibit. We report on the motivations and challenges in designing this reflective tool, which positions visitors as a "human in the loop" to understand and manage their engagement with the exhibit. We used an iterative design process and qualitative methods to explore how and if visitors could (1) access and (2) comprehend the data visualizations, (3) reflect on their prior engagement with the exhibit, (4)plan their future engagement with the exhibit, and (5) act on their plans. We further discuss the essential design challenges and the opportunities made possible for visitors through data-driven reflection tools.more » « less
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