NMAAHC Mobile Stories

I'm a middle school student and for an assignment I analyzed the NMAAHC Mobile Stories app. I was amazed at how thorough the app was. Seeing how as topics such as this are often overlooked in classes. I really appreciated the time and effort put into the app. A part of me expected that the app would have been made just because it would look better to big executives, but that was not all all what I experienced. The home page consisted of exhibitions, video stories, collection stories, stories for families, and other sections. The exhibitions consisted of historical, community, and cultural artifacts and photos. When I clicked on the Slavery and Freedom section I was able to see a picture of Nat Turner’s Bible and listen to a narration of the caption. I learned that Nat Turner preached to convince people to revolt and led a slave rebellion that turned deadly. After white authorities stopped the revolt, Nat Turner escaped authorities for two months until he was eventually hung for his actions. I was even able to say how I felt about an exhibit. I'm amazed at how in-depth the app is. The different sections provide so much more information than I could go into. I honestly don't think anything can be improved upon.

This app is set up very well. I think that splitting up the home page into categories is a very good idea, because it makes it way easier to search and find things you’re truly interested in. I also like how the floor and section of any particular site is listed on the app, so you can know where to find certain things when you visit the actual museum. The videos are great. I don’t know if those same videos are displayed at the museum, but they’re very cool to watch. It’s almost like having a tour guide on your phone, ready to share their knowledge about an exhibit. It did take a considerable amount of time for the app to load at first, but it was bearable, and understandable, since the app has to load all of those pictures and sound/video files. I think that the “Reactions” system is really neat, especially since it allows users to add additional reactions to the page, on top of just choosing one. It may be possible that looking at a picture of an artifact on a phone may take away from the experience of seeing it in person, but it also might motivate someone to go visit and see for themselves everything that’s in the app. I would definitely recommend this app, especially for museum lovers.

I have been given a assignment from my History teacher to review the NMAAHC app. I am a middle schooler (8th grade) and here are some of the features that I think are good about this app and a couple of features that weren’t as good as I expected. The idea of this app is amazing, it allows people to learn about African American history anytime, anywhere at their convenience. It contains the same vast amount of information that you would have obtained by visiting the museum. Although it doesn’t allow one to feel the emotions that could be felt when coming in complete contact with the artifacts, it still is an amazing tool that can be used in classrooms and other places when you cannot go to Washington DC for whatever reason. I found some issues with this app: the time it takes to load and the bad audio. The bad audio quality made it so that I could hear the videos at all when they were at full volume. It was quite disappointing because I wanted to learn more about the topics and I didn’t know if I was missing anything. But that also might have just been an issue with my phone even though I don’t normally have those types of issues. Now on to my other topic, the speed of the loading. It took about five minutes for it to load onto the homepage the first time I used it, which could discourage someone with a small attention span from using it activally. Yes the speed was extremely annoying, but the app had a lot of detail put into it and a lot of quality within it. In my opinion it’s worth it.