Turning Literary Research into Interactive Digital Exhibits with ThingLink

Kyla Ball June 22, 2026

When English teacher Bayly DiPilato set out to reimagine her end-of-year assessment, she had a clear goal: replace the traditional research paper with something that demanded the same intellectual rigour but felt genuinely meaningful to her students. The result was a seven-week, multimedia research project in which students built interactive digital museum exhibits using ThingLink — weaving together historical research, literary analysis, and practical digital skills into a single, ambitious capstone experience.

Atlantic County Institute of Technology (ACIT) is a vocational-technical high school in New Jersey, USA, where English teacher Bayly DiPilato integrates digital tools into her classroom. Bayly has consistently sought ways to move beyond traditional assessments, looking for platforms that offer creative flexibility without imposing unnecessary restrictions on student expression. She first discovered ThingLink over five years ago and recognised its potential to support ambitious, multimedia-rich student projects.

Her curriculum is built around deep literary engagement. In the third quarter, students participate in book clubs, reading texts centred on themes of identity, including Fahrenheit 451, I Am Malala, Fences, and Maus I–II. This foundation sets up a more research-intensive fourth quarter, in which students shift their thematic focus to inequality and justice, drawing out the historical threads that underpin their chosen texts.

The Search for an Alternative

Bayly wanted to replace the conventional end-of-year research paper with something that would demand the same intellectual rigour but feel more meaningful and engaging to her students. The challenge was to design an assessment that required students to conduct genuine historical research, synthesise information, and communicate their findings in a coherent and compelling way — while also developing practical digital skills relevant to the world beyond the classroom.

She also needed a format that would work for a wide range of learners, including students who are less intrinsically motivated. Any project structured around a complex, multi-stage workflow risked overwhelming students if not carefully scaffolded. The tool at the centre of the project would need to be intuitive enough for 16 and 17-year-olds to pick up quickly, while still offering the depth and functionality to support a serious academic exhibit.

Solution: ThingLink

Bayly designed a seven-week research project culminating in student-created digital museum exhibits built in ThingLink. Each exhibit should explore a specific historical thread connected to the book that the student had studied in their book club, examined through the lens of inequality and justice.

The project brought together several tools in a deliberate workflow. Students used Canva to design the anchor images at the heart of each exhibit, some used Zotero to organise their research and format citations, and they all used ThingLink to assemble everything into an interactive, navigable experience. 

Four examples of the students’ projects follow – please explore!

Bayly provided direct technical guidance and expertise on ThingLink’s functionality, such as when to use locked versus unlocked tag modes, and how to embed YouTube videos using embed tags rather than push buttons, so that viewers remained immersed within the exhibit rather than being redirected away from it.

She also provided a visual example of a finished exhibit to help students think like a visitor navigating a museum space, rather than simply like a student completing an assignment. To manage the complexity of the workflow, the project was broken into clearly defined phases, with structured support at each stage including a peer review process using a dedicated template, teacher feedback on top of peer comments, and a final gallery walk held in the school’s media centre. At the gallery walk, students showcased their finished exhibits on Chromebooks in full-screen mode, explored their classmates’ work, and completed a written reflection on two exhibits as well as on their own overall experience.

Bayly also made use of AI, using Claude to help develop and refine project resources, and encouraged students to be transparent about their own use of AI tools, particularly when generating anchor images in Canva.

Benefits and Results

The project was, in Bayly’s own words, a significant success — one she intends to repeat and expand in the coming year. Several clear benefits emerged across student engagement, skill development, and learning outcomes.

The multi-stage, project-based structure, combined with the visual and interactive nature of ThingLink, gave students a tangible sense of authorship that a traditional paper rarely produces. Reflections gathered at the end of the project showed that while students initially found the workflow complex, the step-by-step scaffolding made it manageable, and many felt a real sense of accomplishment on completion. In particular, many students who were typically less motivated expressed genuine pride in their finished exhibits. 

The peer review process added a further layer of value. By critically evaluating a classmate’s exhibit against a structured template, students became more reflective about their own work, identifying strengths and gaps they might not have noticed otherwise. 

“It wasn’t just another essay.”

Replacing a traditional final paper with a digital exhibit for this capstone project gave students the opportunity to experiment with a wholly different way of presenting their findings. From a skills perspective, students developed competencies across research organization, academic citation, visual and learning design, communication skills, and multimedia integration. All these skills are highly transferable, valuable, and in-demand across subjects and disciplines, and all were practiced within a single, coherent project. 

The intuitive nature of ThingLink meant that even technically complex choices, such as embedding video content or structuring interactive tags, were handled confidently by the students.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, Bayly plans to extend the project’s reach by placing physical QR code signs around the school building, linking to the digital exhibits and bringing student work into the broader school community.