September 30, 2010
Young investigators will hunt clues at Burke Museum in ‘Seek Your Own Proof’ online game
This fall, the Burke Museum will be visited by a number of secret agents, each on a special mission, seeking information vital to their task. Oh, and they’ll all be between 8 and 12 years old.
It’s all part of Seek Your Own Proof, an online multiplayer game created by Rocketfuel Productions of Edmonton, Alberta, in partnership with the Discovery Kids cable channel and four museums in the United States and Canada, including the Burke.
“The purpose of the online game is to, through investigative characters, engage children in actual science,” said MaryAnn Barron Wagner, the museum’s director of communications. “It gets the children into the museum to seek actual objects.”
In Seek Your Own Proof, young investigators take on the roles — and the cool cartoon avatars — of teenage agents on missions for the fictional Central Institute for Exploration (C.I.E.). Each mission is a narrative already created and waiting for them to complete, and includes a set of questions to be answered or puzzles to be solved.
The young agents visit their online “headquarters” to learn their missions, but the answers they seek are at the real museum, mostly in the information cards that accompany exhibit pieces. When these investigators find the answers they’re seeking, they return to the online headquarters, where their correct answers can earn them in-game rewards and virtual tokens they can use at the “agent store.”
According to the Seek Your Own Proof website, the missions will emphasize “problem-solving tasks using videos, interactive puzzles and more … (i)n addition, students can build a variety of skills such as reading for details, map reading, following directions, data collection and database research.”
The Burke starts its first mission this fall, and it will run through December. If all goes well, the museum will continue with other missions in 2011. All of the young agents must be accompanied by an adult when they visit the missions at the museums. It’s hoped that Seek Your Own Proof helps participating museums work toward a long-held goal of their own: Families of new museum members.
“This is just the first piece of an ongoing partnership,” said Barron Wagner. “There will be more missions, and we will see if this brings families in who don’t usually come into the museum. That’s my interest in it — engaging students and families who don’t typically come into the museum.”
The other participating museums are the Discovery Times Square Exhibition in New York City, the Galt Museum and Archives in Lethbridge, Alberta; and the Art Gallery of Alberta.
The Discovery Kids cable channel will leave the airwaves in October, to be succeeded by a new channel that’s a joint venture between the toy company Hasbro and Discovery Communications. Discovery Kids will continue its online presence, with Seek Your Own Proof a major part of its presentation.
Learn more about Seek Your Own Proof online here. For more information about the Burke Museum, visit online here.
