How would you describe the Mona Lisa to a 4-year-old? What about Dalí’s famous melting clocks painting? Thanks to MuseKat, an app developed by Bethany Marzewski Crystal ’09, the answers are right at your fingertips.
MuseKat is a free mobile app that provides an interactive, audio-based learning experience for children at museums and other sites, including sculpture gardens and historic walking tours. Users take photos of a piece of art and its description, upload the photos to MuseKat and enter their child’s age. The app, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), then generates a short, age-appropriate audio description narrated by Miko the Meerkat.
Crystal came up with the idea for the “curiosity-based learning tool” while looking for a way to engage her young kids on their trips to museums in New York City, where she lives with her husband, Jason Crystal ’06. Despite having no engineering or coding experience, Bethany created the app using AI tools including ChatGPT.
“I owe everything to the way that I was trained as a journalist,” Crystal says. “Asking good questions is the foundation of smart technologies, and it’s also the core of my Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications education.”
Crystal is now evolving MuseKat into a broader learning studio for families to build the skills kids need to thrive in an AI-powered world.
Laura Horne is an editorial intern for Northwestern Magazine.
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