Entertaining evolution: understanding science from animations

At a natural history museum in Chicago, a series of animations puts a humourous spin on important concepts of evolution. These short films demonstrate the tensions between design goals that include both entertainment and education, and raise important questions about the use of animation for teaching complex processes such as evolution. This study reports the findings from clinical interviews with museum visitors and students on their understanding of evolution from watching these animations. Study Background and Research Questions Most people today are well-versed in the language of film and television. They see one scene cut abruptly to another, and understand that a gap in time or space has just occurred. They see characters or landscapes change within seconds in real time, and recognize this as short hand for the passage of years. These, among others, are techniques commonly used by animators to compress stories into convenient showing periods (Mascelli, 1998), a necessary design strategy when taking museum visitor attention span into consideration (Falk & Dierking, 1992). In each case, the viewer is trusted to fill in the necessary details to form a cohesive narrative. But what are the effects of such techniques on viewers’ understanding when the topic is one already so widely misunderstood (Alters & Nelson, 2002)? What implicit narratives do viewers assume when the knowledge from which they can draw is incomplete or incorrect (Bishop and Anderson, 1990)? At a permanent exhibit on evolution at a natural history museum in Chicago, a series of animations on display puts a humourous spin on important concepts in evolution, such as natural selection, biogeography, and co-evolution. Across this series, the visual and narrative techniques create an entertaining show, but use of these short hands may be at the expense of viewers’ understanding the animation’s content. Cutting, wiping, time lapse, and cross-fading, techniques used to economically transition between scenes, may not give a proper sense of change through generations of organisms across geologic time. Anthropomorphization of non-human organisms, such as plants and sperm, may convey a false sense of agency and an active role in the mechanism of natural selection. The animations demonstrate the tensions between designing for entertainment versus designing for education (Allen, 2004), and raise questions over the effectiveness of animations for teaching complex systems (e.g., Morrison, Tversky, & Betrancourt, 2000). This poster reports the findings from interviews with museum visitors and with undergraduate students who viewed the animations and subsequently explained their understanding of evolution based on what they saw.