Museums use a variety of techniques that provide learning opportunities for people of different ages, levels of interest and knowledge. Museums face the same challenges as many organizations as they seek to adapt their instructional methods to reach and teach digital-media natives while continuing to serve members of other generations. With a desire to employ and evaluate potentially effective multimedia learning solutions, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) developed an educational product with a visual-storytelling approach (i.e., Webcomic) embedded with social media elements as part of a new forensic anthropology exhibit, Written in Bone, which opened in February 2009. To view the Webcomic visit http://anthropology.si.edu/writteninbone/comic. Initial evaluations indicate this visually rich, educational experience is instructionally effective, engages the digitally savvy youth of today, and is surprisingly of interest to audiences over forty-five years old.

In this paper, we discuss the rationale for the design within a framework of recent research on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, audience reading preferences, the tools and processes used, and the lessons learned from applying Visual Storytelling to motivate users to complete a number of voluntary educational challenges (scientific activities and articles). The evaluation of the impact of this approach includes the initial analysis of focus group feedback, user interviews, website tracking data for each page and supporting activities, the hundreds of completed end-user surveys, and traffic/postings on the social networking site, Facebook.