Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums takes the reader behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural History innovates visitor digital engagement, highlighting design techniques used both there and at museums around the world. Based on the author's six years at the landmark institution that inspired the Night at the Museum franchise, the book introduces The Six Tools of Digital Design - user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up - then applies them through case studies across a range of topics: Combining digital experience design with physical museum assets in a guided format, featuring Crime Scene Neanderthal (CSN), a youth co-designed and facilitated in-Hall experience that invited museum visitors to use a mobile app and other tools to investigate a science-based mystery. Game-based learning, featuring three case: a tabletop games (Pterosaurs: The Card Game), mobile games (Playing with Dinos), and commercial off-the-shelf games (Minecraft). Mobile augmented reality games, featuring MicroRangers, which used AR to invite visitors to shrink to microscopic size and explore the Museum to combat threats to global biodiversity. XR experience design, featuring case studies about 360 videos on paleontology and virtual reality projects about ocean life. Science visualizations, featuring Galactic Golf, an astro-visualization that addressed the topics of mass and gravity through a round of mixed reality Martian golf; interactive science visualizations that invited visitors to hold CT-scans of bat skulls in their hand; and Finding Flamingos, a youth program focused on how Conservation Biologists protect endangered flamingos through GIS mapping and predictions software. In addition, the book explores related topics at institutions in Greece and France, and from Washington, D.C. to California.

Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums takes the reader behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural History innovates visitor digital engagement, highlighting design techniques used both there and at museums around the world. Based on the author's six years at the landmark institution that inspired the Night at the Museum franchise, the book introduces The Six Tools of Digital Design - user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up - then applies them through case studies across a range of topics: Combining digital experience design with physical museum assets in a guided format, featuring Crime Scene Neanderthal (CSN), a youth co-designed and facilitated in-Hall experience that invited museum visitors to use a mobile app and other tools to investigate a science-based mystery. Game-based learning, featuring three case: a tabletop games (Pterosaurs: The Card Game), mobile games (Playing with Dinos), and commercial off-the-shelf games (Minecraft). Mobile augmented reality games, featuring MicroRangers, which used AR to invite visitors to shrink to microscopic size and explore the Museum to combat threats to global biodiversity. XR experience design, featuring case studies about 360 videos on paleontology and virtual reality projects about ocean life. Science visualizations, featuring Galactic Golf, an astro-visualization that addressed the topics of mass and gravity through a round of mixed reality Martian golf; interactive science visualizations that invited visitors to hold CT-scans of bat skulls in their hand; and Finding Flamingos, a youth program focused on how Conservation Biologists protect endangered flamingos through GIS mapping and predictions software. In addition, the book explores related topics at institutions in Greece and France, and from Washington, D.C. to California.

In the many studies of games and young people's use of them, little has been written about an overall "ecology" of gaming, game design and play--mapping the ways that all the various elements, from coding to social practices to aesthetics, coexist in the game world. This volume looks at games as systems in which young users participate, as gamers, producers, and learners. The Ecology of Games (edited by Rules of Play author Katie Salen) aims to expand upon and add nuance to the debate over the value of games--which so far has been vociferous but overly polemical and surprisingly shallow. Game play is credited with fostering new forms of social organization and new ways of thinking and interacting; the contributors work to situate this within a dynamic media ecology that has the participatory nature of gaming at its core. They look at the ways in which youth are empowered through their participation in the creation, uptake, and revision of games; emergent gaming literacies, including modding, world-building, and learning how to navigate a complex system; and how games act as points of departure for other forms of knowledge, literacy, and social organization.ContributorsIan Bogost, Anna Everett, James Paul Gee, Mizuko Ito, Barry Joseph, Laurie McCarthy, Jane McGonigal, Cory Ondrejka, Amit Pitaru, Tom Satwicz, Kurt Squire, Reed Stevens, S. Craig Watkins Katie Salen is a game designer and interactive designer as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Design and Technology, Parsons School of Design. With Eric Zimmerman, she is the coauthor of Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003) and coeditor of The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2005).