The rise of ubiquitous technology has resulted in exponential growth in potential options for the design of interactive museum exhibits. We posit that using a framework of parental beliefs about learning and teaching for design can be useful to the HCI community when creating museum exhibits to facilitate learning. Our study builds upon Swartz and Crowley's framework of parental pedagogical approaches through analysis of 118 observations of social interactions between parents and children at museum exhibits. We classify our observations of parent-child interactions into the framework's five categories: Fun Exploration, Individual Discovery, Basic Knowledge, Parent Engaged Learning, and Contextualized Explanations. We identify how these categories can be applied to evaluate and guide design for learning in the context of museums and other informal learning environments.
The CAT Lab studies how culture impacts the use and production of technology with a focus on learning applications, computer science education and designing new technologies with culture as a point of convergence.
