Make the label the clue.
Then ask what it says.
A code at each exhibit opens a card on the visitor's own phone: your recorded audio clip, a question the label answers, the way to the next room. No handsets. No app.
Your first 5 players are free, no card. Then $1 a player.
Each card you write is $1.
Write to us
- Your own voice at every stop
- Nothing personal asked of a child
An example code, as the sheet prints it. The right answer opens your clip.
From label to phone in three steps
Talk it into existence
Connect the AI assistant you already use and describe the rooms, the pieces and what a visitor should notice. The cards draft while you talk — 30 minutes, not a project. You edit every word.
Record and mount
Read each stop's clip into a phone and upload it to its card. Nothing to buy, charge, sanitize or chase at closing time — the audio-guide fleet, minus the fleet. Print the sheet and put a code beside each label; a new exhibition changes the paper, not the fittings.
Visitors scan and play
A family on one phone is one team. On the bill, that is one player. Nobody gives an email or a name; the team gets a name picked for it. Every stop needs a phone signal or Wi‑Fi — check the basement galleries before you print.
Save the Ankylosaurus for the last room
Make the last case a boss — a short fight on the visitor's phone — and lock it until a team has found the three cases before it. A trail with a plot has an ending, and an ending is a reason to reach the last room.
Walk six stops
Six cards from a demo trail, in the order a visitor meets them. Open one to see what the phone shows at the case.
-
The Bladed Tooth Weapon -
Ginkgo Seeds Item -
Triceratops horridus Animal -
Edmontosaurus annectens Animal -
Ankylosaurus magniventris Animal -
Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis Animal
A demo museum: the deck is written about real species, the rooms are ours.
When a code comes off the wall, the staff page says which one
Example
The staff page
- 2,140 Scans
- 61 Days played
- 1 Gone quiet
- 0 Never found
| Code | Last scan | How it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| The Lobby Hall | 12 min ago | Working |
| Triceratops horridus | 2 hours ago | Working |
| The Cypress Swamp | Yesterday | Working |
| Ankylosaurus magniventris | 18 days ago | Gone quiet Reprint |
When the exhibition closes, the trail's report has teams, finishers, scans, the busiest day and the codes nobody found — the numbers a funding report asks for.
What the research says about playing a museum
Four findings. The last one cuts against us.
Lost halfway
Across 108 exhibitions, visitors spent under twenty minutes whatever the show's size, and most stopped at fewer than half of what was on offer. A museum rarely loses people at the door. It loses them halfway through.
Your trail: a code at every stop and an ending worth reaching.
Asked, not told
Being asked beats being told again. Students tested on a passage remembered 61% of it a week later; students who reread it remembered 40%.
Your trail: a question card sends the visitor back to the object. A wall panel can only be read again.
Roediger & Karpicke (2006). Psychological Science, 17, 249–255.
In a museum, with families
Researchers watched 83 families at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. Families who used a storytelling exhibit did more explaining at the fossils afterwards.
Your trail: the story gets a family talking about the case in front of them.
Callanan et al. (2021). Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 689649.
Against us
A meta-analysis of serious games found people learned more through a game than through conventional teaching, but were not significantly more motivated — so we will not promise a trail keeps anyone keener. None of this measures Eggtrail; your trail's report counts your own finishers.
Wouters et al. (2013). Journal of Educational Psychology, 105, 249–265.
What museums ask
Put a trail in the collection
Your first 5 players are free, no card. Then $1 a player.
Each card you write is $1.