The study was conducted over two days at the university
campus hall for three hours each day, from noon to 3 p.m. This time
slot was chosen because it is the busiest period of the day at the
campus hall, since this is when the students have time for lunch
and change between classes. The campus hall is a square surrounded
by buildings of classrooms, where the students have a
space to spend their free time, with seats and tables to have lunch.
For the two days of the experiment, each team displayed their
poster on one of the sides of the hall, without following a predetermined
order.
The campus hall was selected for this experiment for two reasons.
First, it shares similarities with the space where we conducted
the first experiment: it is museum-like space, an open public space
where people pass by, with different motivations and interests.
Second, it is a space for leisure that was designed without any
educational purpose in mind. Finally, both spaces were
“augmented” with exhibits for transforming the space into a
museum-like space.
Two students from each team stayed by their poster throughout
the three-hour time slot every day. One of the students was in
charge of recording the time spent by each of the visitors that
stopped in front of their poster. The other student was in charge of
asking the visitors who stopped to answer the survey in order to
rate the content of the poster, as well as the quality of the experience.
Five researchers supervised the activity. Each researcher had
to supervise 4 of the teams to ensure that the students were
counting the time correctly and to make observations about the
process. On the first day, half of the posters were randomly selected
to use a QR1 code and the other half to use a QR2 code. On the
second day, we switched the behavior of the QR codes for all of the
posters, i.e., the posters that featured a QR1 code on the first day
were given a QR2 code on the second day, and vice versa. All of the
posters therefore used a QR1 and QR2 code during the experiment.
All students, lecturers and professionals that were in the campus
hall when the experiment took place had the opportunity to participate.
A total of 370 (N ¼ 370) engineering students of typical college
age (between 18 and 23) participated in the experiment. 210 people
(N¼210) interacted with the posters featuring the QR1 code and 160
people (N ¼ 160) interacted with posters featuring the QR2 code.