Little Inventors: Designing a Virtual Kids Invention Exhibition

The challenge

Little Inventors is a creative education organisation that looks to inspire children from across the globe, giving them a platform to share their amazing and unique ideas. It also offers selected candidates the chance to develop their inventions, showcasing their creativity and problem-solving skills. This all goes towards building their confidence, curiosity and resilience to support them into their adult life.

Having worked with Little Inventors on other projects, they trusted that Land Digital had the right skillset in digital service design, user experience, development and project management to bring their planned Little Inventors Pioneers exhibition to fruition.

This flagship project funded by the Arts Council, was initially briefed as a physical event, but due to venue closures relating to COVID-19, we suggested adapting it to become a virtual exhibition that would showcase 15 inventions from young pioneers online.

One of the key challenges with switching to a virtual event was ensuring that the exhibition platform accurately showcased the inventions and the pioneers, while also delivering the same interactiveness and engagement they would typically expect at a physical venue.

The process

The project began in May 2020 during the midst of the first UK national lockdown and lasted for 8 weeks, which meant that our discovery and review process had to be adapted to use virtual communications.

Despite these setbacks, we were able to gain a deep understanding of the client’s goals and ambitions through our discovery process, which informed our decisions on how to proceed with the platform development and design.

This included mapping out a clear design strategy that focused on user experience and high-quality visual assets, fully encapsulating the creativity and innovation of the pioneers’ inventions and communicating content in a captivating way.

The process we followed in the initial stages and extensive research into hosting virtual events, helped us build a clear vision and solution for hosting the virtual exhibition.

From a development point of view, we chose to build the site on a Drupal platform that had all the capabilities required to deliver a professional and engaging virtual exhibition website. We used a tried-and-tested process for development, drawing on the technical skills and knowledge across our experienced team.

However, the unique demands of this project also required flexibility, carrying out regular reviews and iterations to ensure deadlines and milestones were met throughout the project from both an internal and client perspective.

The result

Using a thorough discovery and research process we were able to successfully build an online platform that met all of Little Inventors’ Pioneers requirements for the virtual exhibition.

Featuring 15 amazing inventions imagined and developed by budding inventors, the virtual exhibition was showcased around the world, gaining global interest. Capturing the fun, creative and interactive elements of a physical event through an online platform, Little Inventors were able to continue their mission to inspire and innovate children of all ages through R&D focused programmes like this one.

Due to the success of this project and our attention to detail in the planning and execution, we have also been asked to build similar virtual exhibitions based on this model.

Creating a virtual exhibition platform for children to share their creative inventions

The challenge

Tech stack

The process

The result

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