Client:
COSI/Edheads - A collaborative venture of the Franklin County Historical Society and Edheads.org, creating unique educational web experiences designed to effectively convey difficult concepts into easily understood language through the use of the Internet.

Challenge:
COSI/Edheads approached Living Children with the challenge to create a virtual exhibit that would attract a nationwide audience, grab the attention of educators, teachers and students, increase traffic to the Cosi/EdHead site and ultimately enhance educational standards.

Concept:
Over a two-month period and in collaboration with a local Columbus Hospital, Living Children developed the idea of a virtual exhibit that would prepare high school aged students for a live knee replacement surgery viewable via video conferencing. The project involved an immense amount of research in regard to the topic of Total Knee Replacement and included first hand experience of the surgery by attending and observing an actual knee replacement operation in a hospital setting.

Solution:
Having free reign as to the direction of the project, Living Children creatively developed a highly interactive concept that allows users to interact with exact corresponding tools that surgeons use during an actual operation. The exhibit follows the path of a comprehensive yet condensed version of the operation, giving surgery novices an in-depth experience of what transpires during the surgery.

Subsequent Results:

• Working with a non-existent marketing budget, Living Children not only successfully created the Virtual Knee Surgery exhibit, but also promoted the site to over 500,000 unique web visitors in the first three months of the project’s launch. Predicted search estimates of the phrase 'Knee Surgery' will bring 1,320,000 unique visitors a year based on current climbing visitor rates.

• User testing confirmed that all goals, including preparation for the live knee surgery not only met and exceeded initial expectations, but as a bonus those in the medical community have embraced the Virtual Knee Surgery, recommending it to pre and post operative knee patients.

• Since the site launch, a 'Google' search for 'Knee Surgery' now displays the Virtual Knee surgery exhibit as the number one Knee Surgery resource on the Internet, three months consecutively

• The Knee Surgery Exhibit has won multiple awards and mentions ranging from the Flash Forward Education Award, MUSE Gold Science award, Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual, a nomination for the 2004 Webby Awards (Science category) and publication in countless magazine articles throughout the United States and Japan.