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Jarrett Prairie Center

Education | Museum | Nature/Cultural Center

Expert storytellers, the creative team at Balance Studios partnered with Jarrett Prairie Center Museum to help educate and promote the importance of the natural lands in the Rock River region. Teaming up with exhibit design and fabrication specialists, Split Rock Studios, the Balance team designed and developed an immersive theater experience and a Fantasy Farm Touch-Screen application to accompany the museum's already impressive exhibits that promote eco-tourism for the area.

Immersive Theater

To teach about how controlled wildfires are used for prairie preservation, the creative team created an immersive theater experience to show the incredible process in action of the preservation technique. The motion-activated experience begins when guests walk into the theater, and the captivating video shows this unique method for keeping the prairie free of non-native plants, leaving native prairie plants with the nutrients they need to grow and flourish.

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Fantasy Farm

Touch Screen Application

The Fantasy Farm Touch-Screen is a fun, gamified learning experience to show visitors the benefits and detriments of specific choices when different ecosystems interact. Guests chose from four areas: Hilltop Prairie, Old Pasture, Wetlands, or Woodlands, and make decisions on how the land should be cultivated. With each selection, users read about the various plants and animals living in their chosen area and are given general information about conditions, such as rocky outcrops and stones on the surface. Prompts let guests choose what to do with their land, such as plant crops or utilize it for livestock, and the illustration changes, in real time, to show what the area would look with the selection made. When the final choices are saved, guests see how they rate in prairie preservation – the results display explaining how the selections either helped or hindered the land. The main menu illustration then changes back to the original display, now modified by the user's adaptations, and guests can see how their selections change the landscape in the entire ecosystem.

For added fun, guests see how they rate after all four areas are reviewed. They are awarded one of three on-screen badges, with an explanation for each award, describing whether their created ecosystem is able to live in harmony with the natural areas and prairie remnants. But even if they don't earn the highest award, the Pasque Flower Prize, guests can play again and again to better understand how choices incorporating financial gain and environmental responsibility impact prairie ecosystems.

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The Idea

Develop a resource to teach guests about eco-tourism and promote an understanding of the prairie lands in the Rock River region by creating cute, 2D style characters to engage, entertain, and educate.

Services

Creating compelling guest experiences? That's where we live. From producing engaging narratives to developing innovative, interactive experiences that educate, entertain and create connections, we work with our client-partners to provide the best in edu-taining solutions and powerful storytelling. And telling the stories that impact the way humans interact with the world in which we live in means as much to us as it does to our museum-partners.

The Result

An enhanced experience for the groups touring the nature preserve that not only teaching how ecology and economics work together, but the importance of maintaining the land - both with responsible agriculture and controlled burns.