Museum tour in the museum harbor of the German Schifffahrts Museum Bremerhaven

The request for competitive means from the Leibniz Science Campus Postdigital Participation Braunschweig enabled the realization of an interactive museum tour in the museum harbor of the German Schifffahrtsmuseum (DSM) in Bremerhaven. For this purpose, a total of eight participants of our "museum team", a professional from the accompanying service of the Lebenshilfe Bremerhaven as well as two scientists from the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences met on two consecutive Mondays in July 2021 to test a museum tour. The museum tour was conducted with two participants at a time and designed in consultation with the staff from the DSM's "Education and Outreach" department. The content was embedded in interactive, creative and varied tasks. The materials needed for this were disposable cameras, various handicraft materials and storage options. The theme of the museum tour was chosen by the participants. In a vote, they could choose between the two topics "Propulsion of ships" or "Functions of ships". The vote was tight and the topic "Functions of Ships" was chosen. The tour was made up of five different stations. Each station presented a different ship, where new information about the functions of ships could be gathered. In order to find out where the next station or ship was located, additional tasks had to be solved. Furthermore, there were mostly two different difficulty levels per task, due to the differing abilities of the participants. The tasks were moderated by the researchers. The aim was to test different types of tasks such as quizzes, puzzles, listening comprehension, tracking games and photo tasks of a museum tour. The participants rated the difficulty as well as the general satisfaction with the task types using a rating scale (smiley 1 = "easy/great" to smiley 6 = "difficult/bad") and, if necessary, also gave concrete suggestions for improving the tasks. The purpose of this museum tour was for the participants to get to know the different task components of a museum tour and to decide for themselves which of them are the most interesting and best suited for them to learn and discover content in a new way. Based on this, in further workshops, task types will be adapted according to the needs of the participants and a museum tour will be designed in a participatory manner, which will later be transferred into a digital format.