In July, 2013, Gizmodo published AMNH 3D-Printing Camp: Let’s Make Some Dinos detailing our first program based on youth scanning Museum specimens and reconstructing them through a 3D printer. This was followed a few months later with How The AMNH Is Using 3D Printing To Copy Dinosaur Bones.
In May, 2016, Vice’s Motherboard’s How Games Are Changing the Museum Experience covered a variety of efforts around the Museum to explore how games can enhance the visitor experience – from exhibit-based interactives (Flap Like a Pterosaurs), Hall-based games (MicroRangers), to tabletop gaming (Gutsy).
In November, 2015, The Week ran The high-tech museums of the future, an excellent exploration of how we were experimenting with telepresence robots to connect visitors to our cultural halls with individuals from the represented communities.
In December 2016, this lovely A.P. piece, 5 Ways Museums Are Using Technology for New Experiences, focused on a number of museums and included many examples from AMNH, including the VR Weevil experience and our use of the telepresence robot to support our Video Bridge project.
In May, 2017, a new piece came out in the Verge, 20,000-year-old artifacts, 21st century technology: Museums are turning to virtual reality, apps, and interactive experiences to keep tech-savvy visitors engaged. It’s a lovely overview of how a number of NYC-based museums were taking on this topic, including my work on AR in the Museum’s Science Bulletins department.
In October, 2015, the Wall Street Journal wrote a detailed article, Robo Tour Guides Are Ready to Roll at Museums, that beautifully detailed our efforts using telepresence robots to work with the Haida Gwaii Museum to tour visitors in NYC through the cultural treasures from their community.
In March, 2014, the NYTimes wrote the following piece, At Play in Skies of Cretaceous Era, about how the Museum is, in their words, “an eager participant in a 21st-century movement to use games and interactive digital experiences to help museumgoers learn.”
One paragraph addressed games-based learning within our youth education programs:
The museum hosts educational programs that use the hugely popular video game Minecraft to teach science to high school students. And over the last six months, another group of students has been creating a card game about pterosaurs using artwork and research that comes directly from a Museum of Natural History exhibit that is scheduled to open in April.
The April, 2016 NYTime’s Art & Design section featured an article on the launch of MicroRangers, Solving Mysteries at the American Museum of Natural History, Smartphone in Hand.
If you visit the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday and see young people fixated on their smartphones, don’t assume that they’ve abandoned science for the joys of social media. These visitors are not absorbed in Angry Birds — though they may well be investigating bobtail squids or runaway bison. They’ll be playing MicroRangers, a new mobile game that’s the museum’s latest effort to use popular technology to fire youthful enthusiasm about the wild and woolly…
In April, 2014, NY1 caught me at the 11th Annual Games For Change Festival demonstrating the augmented reality app for the Museum’s new pterosaurs card game.
The seminal April, 2016 New York Times cover article, The Minecraft Generation, by Clive Thompson, features both me and my son.