The Design of Context-Specific Educational Mobile Games

Abstract

In the past decades, the use of mobile guides as tools to enrich the visitors' experience has found its way into many museums and cultural tourist sites. The applicability, effect and behavior of these kinds of technologies, however, remain hard to assess. Moreover, every museum or cultural tourist site has its own specific context according to which a mobile guide implementation should be tailored. We created a generic mobile guide framework that aids in the realization of context-specific mobile guides. In the ARCHIE project, we used this framework to develop a mobile museum game for youngsters visiting a museum during a school trip. In this game, collaborative learning plays an important role: we use our mobile guide to support and even stimulate social interaction. Large-scale evaluations have shown the potential power of our approach to increase the attractiveness of museum learning and heritage education for this target group. Based on our experiences in designing and evaluating our mobile game, we propose a set of basic guidelines that steer the realization of educational mobile games for youngsters.