Engaging users is essential for designers of any exhibit, such as the human-computer interface, the visual effects, or the informational content. The need to understand users’ experiences and learning gains has motivated a focus on user engagement across computer science. However, there has been limited review of how human-computer interaction research interprets and employs the concepts in museum and exhibit settings, specifically their joint effects. The purpose of this study is to assess users’ experience and learning outcome, while interacting with a web application part of an exhibit that showcases the NASA Psyche spacecraft model. This web application provides an interactive menu that allows the user to navigate on the touch panel installed within the Psyche Spacecraft Exhibit. The user can press the button on the menu which will light up the corresponding parts of the model with a detailed description displayed on the panel. For this study, participants were required to take a questionnaire, a pretest, and a posttest. They were also required to interact with the web application while wearing an Emotiv EPOC+ EEG headset that measures their emotions while they were visiting the exhibit. During the study, data such as questionnaire results, sensed emotions from the EEG headset, and pretest and posttest scores were collected. Using the information gathered, the study explores user experience and learning gains through both biometrics and traditional tools. The findings show that users felt engaged and frustrated the most and that users gained more knowledge but at varying degrees from the interaction. Future work can be done to lower the levels of frustration and keep learning gains at a more consistent rate by improving the exhibit design to better meet various learning needs and visitor profiles.

Hundreds of thousands of archaeological investigations in the United States conducted over the last several decades have documented a large portion of the recovered archaeological record in the United States. However, if we are to use this enormous corpus to achieve richer understandings of the past, it is essential that both CRM and academic archaeologists change how they manage their digital documents and data over the course of a project and how this information is preserved for future use. We explore the nature and scope of the problem and describe how it can be addressed. In particular, we argue that project workflows must ensure that the documents and data are fully documented and deposited in a publicly accessible, digital repository where they can be discovered, accessed, and reused to enable new insights and build cumulative knowledge.

Cientos de miles de investigaciones arqueológicas en los Estados Unidos realizado en las últimas décadas han documentado una gran parte del registro arqueológico recuperado en los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, si vamos a utilizar este enorme corpus para lograr entendimientos más ricos del pasado, es esencial que CRM y los arqueólogos académicos cambian cómo administran sus documentos digitales y los datos en el transcurso de un proyecto y cómo se conserva esta información para uso en el futuro. Exploramos la naturaleza y el alcance del problema y describimos cómo se pueden abordarse. En particular, sostenemos que los flujos de trabajo de proyecto deben asegurarse que los documentos y datos son totalmente documentados y depositados en un repositorio digital de acceso público, donde puede ser descubiertos, acceder y reutilizados para activar nuevos conocimientos y construir conocimiento acumulativo.