Situated Tangible Gamification of Heritage for Supporting Collaborative Learning of Young Museum Visitors

Abstract

Museums offer an ideal environment for informal cultural learning on heritage artifacts, where visitors get engaged in learning due to an intrinsic motivation. Sharing the museum space among visitors allows for collective learning experiences and socializing with each other. Museums aim to design and deploy Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) in order to embrace the physical materialities of artifacts in the visiting experience. TUIs are believed to be more collaborative, attract more visitors, and persuade them to explore further. Cultural learning on heritage artifacts is particularly meaningful from the early age when opinions and attitudes are shaped. Museums accordingly follow a gamification approach (i.e., using game elements in a non-game context) to provide a collaborative and entertaining learning experience to young visitors. In this study, we investigate the implications of merging these two approaches in order to take advantage of the qualities of both TUIs and gamification in an educational museum context. Accordingly, we present TouchTomb and its evaluation in a real-world museum environment. TouchTomb is a situated tangible gamification installation that aims to enhance informal cultural learning for young visitors and to foster engagement and collaboration among them. The basis of the installation is a shared progress bar and three games with different spatial configurations, embedded into a custom fabricated replica of an original ancient Egyptian tomb-chapel wall on a 1:1 scale. Our field study involved 14 school visits with a total number of 190 school pupils (from 10 to 14 years old). We deployed a mixed-method evaluation to investigate how such a tangible gamification approach entertains and educates 15 pupils collectively for a maximum of 15 minutes, including the evaluation procedures. We particularly investigated how the different spatial configurations of the game setups influenced the stages of pupils’ cultural learning, and the levels of engagement and collaboration among them. We conclude the article by discussing the qualities of tangible gamification and its role in facilitating cultural learning. For instance, cultural learning is enhanced by situating heritage artifacts in the experience, and embedding learning in the reward system. Engagement and collaboration among visitors are fostered by creating a sense of ownership and designing a diversity of goals.

Revealing Hidden Local Cultural Heritage through a Serious Escape Game in Outdoor Settings

“…regarding the impact of the Serious Escape Game on team's behavior (research question 1), it is noticed that the game experience had positive effects and offered players multiple and valuable benefits such as new knowledge, teamwork, collaboration, enjoyment, motivation, interest etc., corresponding to learning outcomes and skills enhancement and improvement reported in other surveys [3,10,20,23,24] and therefore confirming their results. Additionally, it was found that the friendly competition between the two teams helped players to immerse in the activity and the given ability to players to decide how to play allowed them to engage with the game in their own way, confirms the results and guidelines of other studies [4,9].…”

“…They emphasize the need for a connection and balance between the physical world and the game world through the interaction of the elements of the two worlds, the creation of audiovisual material and game mechanics that will not emphasize only the game world and will not distract player's attention from the physical environment [22]. Nofal et al [23] present TouchTomb, "a tangible gamified installation" for students aged 10 to 14, who visit Neferirtenef tomb-chapel in the context of school visits. They built a physical, realistic wall in the size of the true part of the inner west wall of the chapel to work as the interactive tangible interface.…”

“…The installation was deliberately placed just outside the original chapel and hosted three game categories to communicate respectively different types of heritage information (architectural, historical, and artistic). Game setup included a 3D puzzle, cards, LED lights and "a LED strip connected to an Arduino Mega" to indicate progress and valid placements and aimed to study how the installation affects the interaction with the tangible and real interface [23] (pp. 6-9).…”

Locally focused and digitally oriented: examining eco-museums' digitization in a service quality management perspective

“…Digitalization enables cultural institutions to meet the visitors' expectation to get a greater control over the visiting experience (Yu and Wang, 2020). Moreover, it increases the eco-museums' ability to improve the customers' enjoyment of their cultural offering through a balanced mix of edutainment initiatives (Nofal et al, 2020). From this point of view, it is forecasted that: Hp.…”

A theoretical framework for designing smart and ubiquitous learning environments for outdoor cultural heritage

“…Some studies were conducted with respect to cultural heritage sites but not necessarily for outdoors [20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR), and gamification were also harnessed to enhance the experience of sites for instance in [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. However, they were not dedicated for introducing a framework for enhancing learning experience from sites on-the-move.…”