Cotton is King – Interactive

  • Exhibit

Freedom House Museum, Alexandria, VA

Interactive

Touch-monitor educational game for elementary school students: users build a timeline by sequentially selecting each aspect of 19th century cotton production, from planting to ginning to sewing. Based on Virginia and U.S. History 4th and 5th grade Standards of Learning vocabulary. Each correctly selected aspect in the sequence provides more in-depth information.

Exhibit

Diorama with touch-monitor display and interactive flip-up display: including cotton plants and time period cotton scale and weighing basket, withenlarged historic engraving of cotton fields. Panels on plantation fence posts explain process of planting, picking, and ginning. Exhibit is based on Virginia and U.S. History 4th and 5th grade Standards of Learning vocabulary.

Interactive flip up display prompts visitors find out what it would cost to purchase items in 1859. Revealing the relative cost of purchasing a slave to a buggy, horse, and land. Modern day equivalent dollar values are given for each flip up. Also modern day quantities of clothing equivalent to average amount of cotton picked by an individual slave in a day, week, and season.

View a web version of the interactive! →