I started my job as an Explainer at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on November 1, 2014. At the time, the Museum was a few months into its first edition of an alternate reality game, Smithsonian TechQuest: Eye in the Sky, and I was submerged right into the program.

Eye in the Sky had an immersive storyline about the Cold War that visitors followed to locate a downed plane before its pilots and sensitive technology were recovered by the wrong hands.

Eye in the Sky was great for many reasons. It was easy for visitors to follow, with a set path to activity stations. Since it was a time-travel immersion into the past, the Explainers got to act a little bit — pretending we were part of the mission and delivering information and updates with urgency.

For all the knowledge of the Cold War I learned from school and my textbooks, nothing was quite as effective at conveying the mood of the time period than helping agents-for-the-day with a top secret, super important task. (Sometimes the families got so into the task at hand that I almost forgot it wasn’t a real, urgent situation.)

I learned  a lot about the technology of the time period as well. In school, Cold War technology is often boiled down to the Space Race, but learning about the cutting-edge developments made by the SR-71 and the Corona Satellite was fascinating.

The second version of TechQuest, Astronaut Academy, allowed for the fulfillment of everyone’s childhood dream of blasting off into space on a mission to Mars. This edition differed from Eye in the Sky, because instead of a set order of activities for participants to follow, activity stations could be visited in any combination.

Astronaut Academy was fun because we offered several different paths for the astronauts in training. This allowed families to choose how immersed into the game they wanted to be, and allowed each guest to follow their own checklist, instead of needing to work together the entire time.

With the introduction of activities that didn’t need an Explainer to stand watch over, we could offer a lot more variety for participants.  With more tactile activities, rather than solely information-based stations, the program became better suited for families with younger kids.

Going through training at the beginning of the new TechQuest cycle was exciting for me, because rather than jumping into an already established program as I did last time, I was able to see how it was all put together.

Some of the stations for Astronaut Academy overlapped with what I had already learned at work, like facts about spacesuits and what happens to your body once you leave the planet. We had plenty of new stations too, though, and I learned about the history of space travel and lots about Mars.

I got my most intimate immersion into TechQuest in the third installment, Flying Circus, which is currently running at the Udvar-Hazy Center through June 2017.

Flying Circus takes visitors back to the days of aerobatics and barnstorming, challenging them to build an airplane capable of performing the outside loop before the famous pilot Jimmy Doolittle can do one first.

Each station has an accompanying video that is recommended for guests to watch. I got to do voiceover work for many of them, so I know the script very well. I learned about Ruth Law’s Flying Circus and the Curtiss Jenny and the importance of wing, tail, and propeller design.

Last summer, after finishing my first year in college, I was home early for the summer, meaning that I was around on weekdays with only a handful of other Explainers. We all worked extra hard learning every single Flying Circus station as quickly as we could.

In being one of the first to learn the program, I really got to see how scripts were adapted from their planned versions as we figured out how to best convey the information to participants, while still keeping the spirit of design and daring of the era to which the game harkens back.

This version has perhaps the most advanced content yet, but we’ve made the information accessible to visitors of all ages. Teaching my fellow Explainers the stations helped to solidify the concepts of the program in my own mind, making my personal explanations of these topics smoother and more understandable.

Watching Flying Circus go from its final development stages to implementation was a fascinating process. I’m nothing short of excited to see what next year’s TechQuest will be, and even more ready to help bring it to life.