Galaxy Makers: creating an online component to a science exhibition for re-engagement, evaluation and content legacy

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and evaluation of an online component for the Galaxy Makers science exhibit, aimed at increasing engagement, preserving content, and gathering impact data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online platform for a science exhibit that enhances re-engagement, content longevity, and impact assessment, with insights for future implementations.

Findings

Successful increase in participant re-engagement

Creation of a lasting digital content repository

Effective collection of participation and impact data

Abstract

For the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2016, the Institute of Computational Cosmology from Durham University created the Galaxy Makers exhibit to communicate our computational cosmology and astronomy research. In addition to the physical exhibit we created an online component to foster re-engagement, create a permanent home for our content and to allow us to collect the ever-more important information about participation and impact. Here we summarise the details of the exhibit and the successes of creating an online component. We also share suggestions of further uses and improvements that could be implemented for online components of other science exhibitions.