Dear Listers:

The Austin Children's Museum recently moved into a large
'new' (renovated downtown warehouse) facility. Part of our
upgrade has been an increased presence of computers in our
galleries and exhibits. Formerly a Mac facility, we now use
Dell PCs--and the learning curve has been incredibly steep!

Several galleries have commercial software with just
rollerball/button interface. However, our feature exhibit
includes a custom-made database program on two computers
which are networked together. This exhibit is called Spark
of Invention. Visitors can 'invent' at several activity
tables and then go to an area called the Certification
Station. Here visitors go through a series of steps that
loosely simulate the patenting process. The database is the
core of this process--visitors enter their name, their
invention's name, a description of what the invention does,
and info about where the life area where it can be used
(home, school, etc.). Then the program issues them a unique
number in sequence (like a patent number). Visitors can look
through the database to find their invention or to see what
others have invented.

We've had plenty of problems with this program. Some have
been solved via hardware or operating system adjustments
(and we're not confident that we know everything yet).
Others have been traced to small bugs in the program that
have been taken care of. But we're not really sure how many
of these problems might have been caused or aggravated by
visitor behavior. We're using KidDesk as a system protection
method, so visitors who somehow manage to randomly hit the
database escape keycode don't go straight to Windows (where
they can wreak huge havoc!). But things still happen. For
example, one visitor entered long strings of numbers in the
invention description window which somehow caused a
corruption in the data file--which then effectively disabled
the entire program. Other times we've observed random
pounding on the keyboard, rather than working with the
program.

We'd sure appreciate hearing your experiences and
accumulated wisdom about 1) using computer programs that
require keyboard use, 2) using computer programs that
require visitor data input. Is it just a bad idea to use
keyboards, or are there means to make them effective but
less vulnerable to misuse? Regarding data input, are you
familiar with ways to protect programs that are not 'read
only'?

Thanks for your time and insight!

Sheila