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There are many factors that affect how students engage in the learning process, especially when it comes to informal science education. This study examines how one such factor, the format of activity sheets presented to students, affects student engagement in an informal physics educational environment. The study was performed over two semesters at the same Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community (PISEC) site, where in the first semester students were provided with more traditionally layed out activity sheets and in the second semester the activity sheets were designed to present students with more options for expressing their work. We found that changing the format of the activity sheets to the more open design prompted students not only to engage more but also to change how they were engaging, increasing the quantity of questions, results, explanations, and scientific vocabulary they wrote down on the activity sheets. We also found evidence that explicitly prompting students to perform an action on an activity sheet such as making a drawing drastically increased the likelihood of them performing that action. These results suggest that educators can increase student engagement with activities by providing explicit prompts for students to complete while leaving it up for the students to decide on how best to respond to the prompt.