Exhibit Designs for Girls’ Engagement: A Guide to the EDGE Design Attributes

The Exhibit Designs for Girls’ Engagement (EDGE) project is a three-year Exploratorium-run, NSF-funded, research study aiming to identify the most important design attributes for engaging girls at STEM exhibits. We identified nearly 100 exhibit design attributes that had the potential for better engaging girls. To test those 100 attributes and their relationship to girls’ engagement, we studied more than 300 physics, engineering, math, and perception exhibits at the Exploratorium, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Arizona Science Center. The purpose of the EDGE research was to winnow that list of 100 potential design attributes to the most important ones for engaging girls. The results of this exploration, highlighting the nine design attributes that strongly and positively related to girls’ engagement across the three institutions, are described in this Guide to the EDGE Design Attributes.

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