 Kia ora everyone, maenai Tom, maenai learning specialist at Auckland Museum Kia ora kato, maenai Mandy, maenai digital producer at Auckland Museum So to begin this talk I just want to take you back to three years ago when I was a freshie at Auckland Museum and as part of our induction we actually got taken into the bowels of the museum to see our vast and incredible collection and it completely blew my mind it had been a long held dream to do such a thing but what actually amazed me was the fact that a lot of these objects would not see the light of day for decades and decades Is that not playing? Yeah, so of course digital can help to fill this gap by creating digital surrogates either in the form of photos or photogrammetry which have done an incredible job but what I think has actually been a game changer has actually been 3D printing and scanning Like when you see these kids looking at these objects they have them right up close to their faces and they're watching, seeing every little detail and really interrogating it so yeah, a really important piece of tech Yeah, so one of the struggles or challenges that the learning and engagement team has been actually marrying these objects to a story or many stories and this is what I think Museum in a Box does really, really well because it allows these objects to talk so without further ado we're going to do a quick demo of Museum in a Box A highly prized, beautifully crafted instrument made of a wooden mouthpiece lashed onto a spiralling shell So, I'll just... So the tech behind this is there's 3 important components and that's the NFC sticker which is actually on that putata there you might want to lift it up Tom and then an NFC reader and a small credit card size computer called a raspberry pie so basically what happens is the reader asks the sticker, hey what object are you? and it says, I'm the putata and then that triggers the audio file to actually play and the really cool thing about this tech is it's cheap those boxes are about $500 and each NFC sticker is $0.50 so incredibly accessible so you would have encountered this tech before if you've ever used a transport card like a hop card or a snapper card or ever paid for a beer at Splaw increasingly this tech is being used in the museum and environment and as part of this talk I actually got to research some ways that it's actually being used and one of the cool applications is an exhibition that's actually coming to to Papa in December and that's the Wonderland exhibition so participants get given an NFC enhanced map when they first arrive and they can trigger various digital experiences as they walk round another awesome application is something called the story of a lamp and this was created by the digital agency called Sandpit and so what you can do as part of this experience at the Melbourne Arts Centre is you can go and get an NFC enhanced book and you take it to a lamp and you just put it at the bottom of the lamp and it tells you about the story of the Melbourne Arts Centre so quite a nice kind of pick-a-path and I'll just show you a video of how it actually works Hello? Can you hear me? You can, can't you? Hey, come in a little bit closer I've got a story to tell you Yeah, so some really cool applications on that Oh, there we go So going back to my first question like how can we blow the minds of these young children and in order to do that I needed to ask another question and that is, well, what do they know about our collection? Do they know anything? And so we actually asked some of the kids at a Parnell Primary in Mangafo school what they knew about our collection and as you can see they took the question very, very, very seriously How many objects do you think are stored away in site keeping at the museum? I think like about maybe over 100 would be stored in the museum because the museum is like really big See, I'm maybe 100s maybe? 150? I don't know, but there's a lot Maybe about 50 70 170 60 201 209 I'm proud to say we completely broke their noodle and, yeah, we can definitely blow their minds How many objects do you... So they were all wrong and you could completely underestimate the museum We have about one and a half million natural science specimens about over 200,000 human history objects and when we talk about digital and library archives that's somewhere in the millions So it's part of our job in the Learning and Public Programs team to highlight those hidden collections not just the collections themselves but also the connections that they all have too And so we think we're having a really good idea here with the Museum in the Box Who are the people behind Museum in the Box? As Tim was saying, they're a London-based agency and there's only four of them and they work in service to the cultural heritage sector and this is one of them assembling the boxes there So they assembled the boxes on site and actually sent them out to 40 Glam institutions and we were one of the lucky ones Sorry, I forgot this to be part of that, yeah We distributed all around the world and one of the cool things that they did is they created quite a community amongst us So via a Slack channel we could troubleshoot any problems, ask any questions share digital assets or any successes that we had during the pilot programme And they were very much part of the lab themselves So one thing they did is a pop-up exhibition called Seeing Red which was a series of 1970s feminist posters and they had the responses of children via Museum in the Box So a really nice way to kind of create this layered, self-guided participatory experiences So for all of the participants we had to think about how are we going to create fun, engaging, interesting interactive content and we all came across similar questions and one of them was who was going to be our narrator who was going to be the voice that was going to come out of the box would it be a broadcaster, an actor a child a subject matter expert with a centaurian voice There were lots of possibilities but one interesting co-lab was actually done by the people at Museum in the Box and they travelled to the Ezeco Museum in Cape Town and they got Zulu Elders to pick out a series of objects and describe them So these Zulu children had the opportunity to hear from these people who understood these objects, had experienced them and knew their history really well and I don't know if you've heard of the Pacific Collection Access Project but Auckland Museum has been working over a series of years with Pacific knowledge holders to share their knowledge around our Pacific Collection so this would be an absolute sitter for us Another question that came up was what was the subject matter going to be and obviously those objects that were lending themselves to being 3D printed or there were spare specimens or they could be reproduced would be helpful to choosing your subject matter and another thing we had to consider was whether it could be shareable or remixed so could it be shared across from New Zealand and beyond we had tonnes and tonnes of content on this Museum in a Box site so how could we actually share that and remix that and this really came to light with me with this particular piece here at the Canadian Museum and when I saw this I was like wow maybe we have some of these kind of fungi so I instantly emailed the Natural Sciences Team and sure enough we do so potentially we could use some of their content or add to their collection The other question that we had to think about is how are we going to capture our audience like kids are a pretty tough audience and one thing that I learnt when I was watching them is that if you showed a part of an object or a part of a specimen their curiosity was really ignited like when we showed them a whale's tooth a snapper jaw or a shark tooth they just really were excited by those particular objects and I think it required them to actually do the hard work of figuring out what that came from, what specimen that came from or what object that actually came from Personally, one thing I'd really like to do is a series of macro-images because I think this would really ignite their curiosity Can anybody guess what insect this actually is? No, not you! It is, yeah Okay so when we're thinking about using this box we can think about the digital curriculum which is coming next year So the digital curriculum is not just allowing children to use digital technology but it's also to become digitally capable thinkers how do you create content in a digital way So there's going to be a big appetite for this kind of programming come next year So what do we actually do with the museum in the box? We had another, so to speak, museum in the box It's called the Kete Wananga that is brand new to our new learning offer This is a box filled with natural science specimens So in this one it's from the marine environment from the Hauriki Gulf and schools, they can hire this kit and they have it for as long as they want and integrate it in any part of their learning So we thought, okay, why don't we make an underwater themed museum in the box So Tim, can I get you to hold up the shag? So on the shag here it's 3D printed This tells the story of some museum research about the shag and I'm not going to ruin guys' speech later so no spoilers, he'll talk about that later Another one is if you could hold up the ship So Aaron here, my colleague is the voice for the ship So he is a fish living underwater and the sound associated with the NFC sticker is the sound of a ship passing above you if you're living underwater and what effect could that have to the communities living down there Andrew, also another colleague made our Putatada replica of two schools, Mangafo and Parnell So instead of me telling you the feedback we've got some additional footage I would describe the food books as it converts objects into stories and audio Like this little mechanical technology thing I would describe it as like a storytelling box Each item has a sticker on When they put the sticker on this thing it tells you some facts and stuff It's like a podcast, a very short one The bootbox is really fun because it's like having playing and learning combined I really liked the fact that they didn't have an insight into what it was going to be and they had to use a different sense rather than just looking or sitting at a device I like the the conch shell because it looks really interesting and I don't know that much about it I've never seen one before So the box was really positive We're going to do that again right Get down and get up, this is my shell Absolutely, something that the kids have never seen before That opportunity to see Artifacts, to link artifacts to a new kind of learning but then hear about them was something that the kids were really interested in and engaged with One of the things we'd really love to see is this becoming part of an interactive piece of work for the kids where the kids get to experience the objects hear about the objects, link that to their own inquiries and then take that into the next step and be able to perhaps code their own little tag so that they can then take what they've seen from this and then use that as a way of sharing their own learning rather than just purely receiving the information, being able to create and share information through that medium as well as something we'd love to see I'd probably like to see what happened with the tunics or the togas I think I'd want to see what happened to them because I don't know Did they get laundered? I like knowing about the history and I like knowing about history and snakes Something extinct maybe The sound of something extinct because if it's extinct then I've probably never heard it before T-Rex warring because I have no idea what it sounds like I'm pretty sure it would be pretty cool To do something that involves where the kids are from like their cultures so they could almost have an object that relates to them and their culture and then can tell a story whether it's food, history celebration, something or even facts about their country or whatever it is, I think that would be really interesting community within your classroom that you're all sharing something that's really special to use The kids have so many different cultures and so many different influences in their lives that maybe they haven't found out before so actually getting the community in their home to get involved I think that would be really cool to make it really special for each class The greatest benefit twice of this kit in this programme is the availability to our teachers in their classrooms and to our kids being able to access this information without necessarily having to go to the museum and I think when we think about how we want to engage our children and learning every moment counts so the opportunity for the kit to be here and travel to us and our teachers to have time beforehand to experience it and think about how they're going to use it and have wider reaching implications than the traditional model of going to the museum seeing an exhibition and talking about it when we come home I would describe the... Yes, so all in all the kids loved the tech they loved clapping their eyes on these unusual objects and they loved hearing from experts One teacher actually expressly said that he was convinced that the children were bored by his voice so by bringing many voices into the classroom we could instantly engage them and what we found was also really successful was if the teacher primed them so made them make predictions about these objects or asked some questions and as you can see this child has a rather terrifying prediction of the plastic cup One teacher left the box just sitting in his classroom for a week as a tease and he got students to go up and listen to it see if it's changed at all he added some stickers to the box throughout the week and he's like, ooh, it's changing One kid was very curious and decided to email me and I shouldn't have left my business card on top of the box and he didn't get permission to do it so he was so intrigued that he happened to email a stranger which is not very good lucky it's just me, it doesn't matter he got banned from his Chromebook for a week The team at Museum in a Box said they loved the way we explored the medium of sound and we went out of our way in order to scavenge sound, collect sounds, create sounds and now that the pilot has actually finished they've launched a series of kits for small and large organisations so check it out We think it was a really successful pilot the teachers and the students seemed to love it and they loved the idea of making their own collections and also having it in their schools so I think that was great to hear We're definitely going to have it in our programming next year in what capacity, not 100% certain so we do have a demonstration in the aptly named Oceana Room where you can come and try all the museum in the box have a look at the sort of stuff that we've created and we'd really love to see or hear what you think would work in your institution as well so come and see us at the Auckland Museum stall Any questions for Tom or Mandy? Questions I've got lots but I'll ask them later Great, alright, thank you afternoon tea time I think