The Children's Museum project is unique wihin cs92. The classroom projects all have a defined user population, the kids in the class. Our population is the visitors to the children's museum. We have the advantage of being able to specifically say, "This interactive software is targeted at to 7-10 year old children." But we're unable to name specific users (or a captive user set). There is one additional difficulty. The hardware is currently not together, and our contact at the museum is not the tech expert. So we'll be unable to conduct user testing until the hardware is together. It should be within the next week to ten days.
Given the age of the kids using the software, it's unlikely that they would articulate comments such as, "This mouse gesture is non-intuitive." or "I would appreciate a more specific goal when engaging wih the software." Even beyond the immense difficulties of quantitative user studies in general, we have young kids as users. In light of all this, I think user testing guided by anecdotal evidence makes much more sense. Louisa, our contact at the museum, said that she would be able to steer some kids in to use a part of our project (it'll be set up at a temporary place until the final date). What I bet we will see would be goos results like laughs, excitement, the kids being engaged and interested in the material and it's presentation. Bad results might include confusion (not knowing how to interact with the software, having the material/visuals be too complex), boredom (having the material/visuals be too mundane).
We'll post user results once we get some...