TY - JOUR
T1 - Situated Tangible Gamification of Heritage for Supporting Collaborative Learning of Young Museum Visitors
AU - Nofal, Eslam
AU - Panagiotidou, Georgia
AU - Reffat, Rabee
AU - Hameeuw, Hendrik
AU - Boschloos, Vanessa
AU - Vande Moere, Andrew
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the Antiquity Department of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, specifically Dr. Luc Delvaux and Bieke Janssen, for their support and assistance during the museum experiment. We are very grateful to Yosr Elghazouly, Sinem Görücü, and Payam Norouzi for voluntarily observing and assisting the experimental phase of the study. We would like also to thank the museum's public service and all the volunteers for their participation during their museum school-visit.
Funding Information:
Eslam Nofal gratefully acknowledges the PhD scholarship funded by the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education. Authors’ addresses: E. Nofal (corresponding author), Research[x]Design, Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, 3001, Leuven, Belgium; email: eslam.nofal@kuleuven.be and Department of Architecture, Assiut University, 71516, Assiut, Egypt; email: eslam.nofal@aun.edu.eg; G. Panagiotidou, Research[x]Design, Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, 3001, Leu-ven, Belgium; email: georgia.panagiotidou@kuleuven.be; R. M. Reffat, Department of Architecture, Assiut University, 71516, Assiut, Egypt; email: rabee@aun.edu.eg; H. Hameeuw, Antiquity Department, Royal Museums of Art and History, Jubelpark 10, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium; email: h.hameeuw@kmkg-mrah.be and Research Unit Ancient History, KU Leuven, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; email: hendrik.hameeuw@kuleuven.be and Department of Archaeology, UGent, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 33, 9000 Ghent, Belgium, email: hendrik.hameeuw@ugent.be; V. Boschloos, Department of Archaeology, UGent, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 33, 9000 Ghent, Belgium, email: vanessa.boschloos@ugent.be and Antiquity Department, Royal Museums of Art and History, Jubelpark 10, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium email: v.boschloos@kmkg-mrah.be; A. Vande Moere, Research[x]Design, Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, 3001, Leuven, Belgium; email: andrew.vandemoere@kuleuven.be. Authors current address: E. Nofal, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Grote Gracht 90-92, 6211 SZ Maastricht, The Netherlands; email: e.nofal@maastrichtuniversity.nl. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 1556-4673/2020/02-ART3 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3350427
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
PY - 2020/2
Y1 - 2020/2
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
KW - collaboration
KW - cultural learning
KW - gamification
KW - heritage communication
KW - museum studies
KW - tangible gamification
KW - tangible interaction
U2 - 10.1145/3350427
DO - 10.1145/3350427
M3 - Article
SN - 1556-4673
VL - 13
JO - Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage
JF - Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage
IS - 1
M1 - 3
ER -