This past Thursday, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore announced that the Science Centre Singapore is bringing exhibition content directly to visitors’ hands through the Smart Learning Place project.
In November, the museum will be rolling out Brain Explora. This is a new mobile app designed to connect and engage visitors to the exhibits within the museum.
IDA collaborated with partners to come up with ‘low-cost electronic beacon sensors’, also known as iBeacon technology. The sensors will allow the exhibits to feed content to mobile devices through Bluetooth. The Science Centre can also use the sensors to generate heat maps based of visitor movement.
Brain Explora will include various features, such as video clips, quizzes, personalised information for visitor profiles, and gamification.
Gamification is used to incentivise young visitors to visit as many exhibits as they can. For each exhibit they stop at, a virtual badge is rewarded.
Users may also create their own content to share or look back on while revisiting the concepts they encountered.
“There might be visitors who are very smart and know more about the subject matter than the exhibition planners, and add their knowledge to the content. The Smart Learning Place can thus encourage crowd-sourcing of knowledge!” Associate Professor Lim Tit Meng, Chief Executive of Science Centre Singapore stated to the media.
This smart learning experience follows the Infocomm Media 2025 Plan’s focus on enhancing ICT use in education. By allowing visitors of the Science Centre interact with exhibits in such a way, provides deeper learning which serves the transforming educational pedagogy.
