Ada and grace: direct interaction with museum visitors

We report on our efforts to prepare Ada and Grace, virtual guides in the Museum of Science, Boston, to interact directly with museum visitors, including children. We outline the challenges in extending the exhibit to support this usage, mostly relating to the processing of speech from a broad population, especially child speech. We also present the summative evaluation, showing success in all the intended impacts of the exhibit: that children ages 7–14 will increase their awareness of, engagement in, interest in, positive attitude about, and knowledge of computer science and technology.