GMAT Sentence Correction (SC) | Unlike the original National Museum of Science and

In the independent clause 'The VLP, an online version....', VLP encourages visitors To Touch. This Touching results into activation of the animated functions of the piece. If it were present[, + present participle] it would be correct too.

But, I made mistake and didn't select option D. I thought Activate was in plural. Generally, after Thereby in an SC Question we see[, + present participle] , so here I got confused and thought that activate is in plural form.

Can you explain the structure of Thereby Activate?
If we are to show Result