The American Association of Museums has again announced the winners of the MUSE Awards for excellence in media programmes produced by or for museums.
In this, the eighteenth year of the Awards, the competition received more than two hundred applications from a wide variety of museums in North America, Europe Australia and Asia . A total of 39 projects, divided into ten categories, were honoured with the Award. The projects displayed an innovative and imaginative approach to the wide variety of possibilities provided by technology for communication between the visitor and the museum through audio, cell phones, interactive handheld tours, interactive kiosks, multimedia installations, podcasts, online collection and image databases, videos and e-mail marketing campaigns.
The Awards are given in recognition of the efforts made by museums to develop programmes that benefit from the combination of technologies in their projects and exhibitions with the aim of improving communication with the visitor. The Awards are also a source of inspiration for our future projects.

The Award-winning projects can be consulted at:
http://www.mediaandtechnology.org/muse/2007muselist.html

La Factoria d'Imatges is a design studio that has become a pioneering company in the field of graphic design and interactivity.
After seven years carrying out all kinds of graphic design and multimedia projects, La Factoria d'Imatges has achieved a position as a young but competitive company in its sector.
Educational online games are an effective teaching resource for raising awareness, disseminating information and for prevention.
Games have traditionally been used for educational purposes because they make learning more fun and because they make things easier for kids to understand, so the educational game applied to the CITs represents a great educational resource. Such games enable constant, real-time follow-up concerning the number of users online at any given time, what they do, how long they stay online, where they are from and so forth, and because of their interdisciplinary and multimedia character, which enables text, music, photographs, sound, video and animations to be incorporated into a single game, they facilitate and reinforce comprehension. And they are cheaper than other educational resources such as traditional text books, CDs and DVDs etc. (although they do not aim to replace, but rather to complement these resources).
A package of interactive teaching materials has been produced for the Museu de la Ciència i la Tècnica de Catalunya to help explain the formation of fossil fuels, the extraction processes, combustion and the workings of many internal combustion engines exhibited in the Museum. They include various interactive Flash applications intended for the general public that can be consulted on eight touch-sensitive screens in the Museum. There is also an online virtual visit available.