Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego Post-Opening Research Report

Change Your Game | Cambia tu juego (CYG) is a 3,500 square foot exhibition located in the Lemelson Hall of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. Uniquely, CYG aims to support history museum visitors to move beyond passively consuming information to make meaning about ways in which the exhibition is personally relevant and to (re)consider inventiveness within their current and future life roles. This research report summarizes how the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) theoretical model and the Visitor Identification and Engagement with STEM (VINES) design principles were applied to the design of the exhibition, and provides an empirical study to address two research questions: RQ1. What theoretical model of inventive identity can we formulate from an analysis of inventive identity indicators and their shifts among diverse visitors? RQ2. What can we conclude about exhibition design principles that the field can use to promote inventive and other STEM identity exploration and change among diverse groups of visitors? A key finding was that CYG supported diverse visitors to construct personal relevance, learn to “re-see” inventiveness as an accessible everyday concept, consider the implications of their inventive experiences in the exhibition to their roles outside the museum, and explore their own identity as an individual with inventive capacities in a variety of life domains. The DSMRI provided a theoretically robust, complex, and dynamic framework to conceptualize inventive identity as a network of invention-related beliefs, goals, self-perceptions, and perceived action possibilities that manifests within a person’s role identity in their lived context (e.g., athlete, parent, student, engineer, citizen). The VINES framework provided a comprehensive set of design principles for the effective operationalization of features in very different types of exhibits (e.g., personal inventor stories, artifacts, interactives) that, across multiple exposures and variable contents and exhibit types, promoted diverse visitors’ inventive identity exploration.