Recent developments have shown a growing interest in interactive pervasive computing scenarios supported by public displays as well as their introduction into educational environments. Still, one of the biggest challenges in the design of public display systems is to engage users to interact and be motivated to do so. In this paper, we report a study exploring the potential effect of the awareness of peers' interactions with an educational video installation and the popularity of the display system on the user engagement. The awareness is facilitated by pop-up notifications and visualizations of interactions on the display screen. We conducted a six day long deployment of our system which included a diary study, during which we altered the display's dynamic behavior in order to test different conditions. The analysis of the diary reports and the progression of the users' interactions showed that the users found the presentations of peer interactions to be engaging, both with the display system as well as the social context around it.