Promoting heritage awareness among school children in Singapore
Chennupati K. Ramaiah, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Demonstration: Demonstrations 1

A web-based multimedia exhibition 'Colours of the Wind' was designed and developed based on an existing exhibition that took the original form of static physical displays. The exhibition is part of a series of National Education exhibitions put together by the National Archives of Singapore to promote heritage information awareness among school children. As part of the design, a requirements gathering study was carried out with 77 university students to determine the users' requirements in terms of their computer and web experience, content expectations of online exhibition and their prior exposure to these systems. Based on these user requirements, a prototype of an online exhibition system was developed which was subsequently evaluated to assess the prototype and to elicit gaps in the design. In the evaluation with 30 students from the same pool form whom requirements were gathered, it was found that the online exhibition was well received by the surveyed community. The respondents were of the opinion that it has satisfied most of their requirements of an online exhibition apart from a search engine. They also felt that online exhibitions were the most flexible mode of delivering heritage information to inculcate awareness among the school children and public, particularly so, in the context of Singapore. It is because that Singapore is one of the countries of highest percentage of Internet users in the world.