Joint Choice Time: A Metric for Better Understanding Collaboration in Interactive Museum Exhibits

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new metric – Joint Choice Time (JCT) – to measure how and when visitors are collaborating around an interactive museum exhibit. This extends dwell time, one of the most commonly used metrics for museum engagement – which tends to be individual, and sacrifices insight into activity and learning details for measurement simplicity. We provide an exemplar of measuring JCT using a common “diversity metric” for collaborative choices and potential outcomes. We provide an implementable description of the metric, results from using the metric with our own data, and potential implications for designing museum exhibits and easily measuring social engagement. Here, we apply JCT to an interactive exhibit game called “Rainbow Agents” where museum visitors can play independently or work together to tend to a virtual garden using computer science concepts. Our data showed that diversity of meaningful choices positively correlated with both dwell time and diversity of positive and creative outcomes. JCT - as a productive as well as easy to access measure of social work - provides an example for learning analytics practitioners and researchers (especially in museums) to consider centering social engagement and work as a rich space for easily assessing effective learning experiences for museum visitors.