Planning and Preparing

Hello all,

As you are aware of we have offically finished our films, however, we still have lots to do, and we will continue to keep you updated for a while longer. These days we are mainly busy with planning the year-end exhibition, and preparing for the evaluation we will be doing in the Yorkshire Museum. If everything goes according to plan our films will be part of the museum exhibit next week, and we are excited to hear what the museum visitors think of them.

Today has been all about planning and preparing, as we have started thinking of how to do evaluations in the museum. As none of us had any particular experience with surveys and interviews, it was very helpful to get some help from Sophie Norton and Tom Smith, who taught us about data collecting and Google docs. We spent quite a lot of time deciding on what methods we wanted to use for our evaluation, as they needed to reflect the research aims we decided on. We chose to focus on surveys and observation, in addition to giving
the visitors the chance to comment on our films. We wanted to get as extensive results as possible, but as there are only four of us, we had to focus on a couple of methods, and hope they will give us enough results.

In the surveys we want to ask the visitors if they have an interest in archaeology, and whether the museum visit has contributed to this interest in any way. In the observation we are going to spend time both in the Star Carr exhibit and the Roman exhibit, to see how people interact with these exhibits, and if there is any difference in the amount of time they spend in the different exhibits. We are also interested in seeing whether they are watching our films, especially as they are located in an area of the museum that is easy to miss.

While Katrina and Lizze were working on creating the survey, Lexie and Astrid were planning the logistics of our evaluation day. We will spend all of Thursday in the museum, and hopefully get all the results we need to write a great final report.