ITI/LARSyS

This paper introduces ClueKing, a children's pervasive game which encompasses context-aware and parents mediation to create an informal learning environment. In this paper we review related theories of inquiry-based learning and parent involvement, the basic pedagogical model, and mobile learning and pervasive games as the technological framework. The basic concept of ClueKing defines an interactive environment where teachers define the learning goals and challenges and parents mediate their application on the home setting, the children schedule and how to promote their engagement. The system's architecture is also presented, as well as the workflows for the development of ClueKing. Since this is work in progress the paper concludes with the next steps and future work to be carried out.

This Master's Dissertation is presented for obtaining a Masters Degree in Cultural Management from the University of Madeira. The purpose of this dissertation focused on making a brief review of the theoretical literature in printed books (paper) and digital books. In the course of this research were addressed concepts such as hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia.
This dissertation had one fundamental question that may appear simple at first look: how differently can language (in its oral and written dimensions) be on the digital support versus paper? To try to answer this, it was essential to do a practical research so we could be able to obtain a reasoned and rigorous response to this question.
The practical fieldwork was held from the creation of an unpublished text, written by the author of this dissertation, through which it was intended to measure and analyze the effects of the transition from writing on paper to digital media and/or the coexistence of both supports, in order to attempt to understand how the replacement and/or the co-presence of media can affect (and how) the reading comprehension of children in an educational context. The main objective was to analyze the influence of written and audio-books in the learning of children from 4th grade of the 1st Cycle of Basic Education. For this purpose, two versions of the story were elaborated: one in paper and one in digital format (an e-book to be viewed on a computer). The reactions of the children towards these two formats were measured by comparison. After the conclusions obtained in this fieldwork, there was space for reflection that lead in the development of an interactive mobile application for iPads, which is currently available in the Apple Store.

In this poster we present a study exploring the benefits of using audio guides instead of human tour guides to foster children's engagement and learning outcomes during their visit to a natural science museum. We conducted an experiment in a museum with 25 children from a school (9-10 years old) in order to discover if there was any effect of the usage of audio guides regarding children's engagement and learning outcomes. We did a pre-test and post-test analysis for learning, applied scales and conducted qualitative observation. We found that children using the audio guide were keen to repeat the tour. We also noticed differences in the learning outcomes (the group without audio guide had better results), although it was not statistically significant. We conclude the poster with a set of suggestions to increase enjoyable learning experiences for children when using audio guides in a museum tour.

The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. Adopting a user-driven innovation framework along with cooperative inquiry, we report and discuss a case study that has been designed to involve users in the ideation of interpretive experiences for a local museum. Working in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Funchal, this contribution will present and discuss co-design sessions that were aimed at participants with ages 15 to 17 and where they were asked to ideate an interactive museum experience. As a result of the co-design sessions, we have found several design patterns. We have grouped these patterns into four categories that express the interests of a teenage audience; these categories are: " interactions " , " gaming " , " localization " and " social media ". Our findings suggest that teenagers value interactive technologies when visiting museums and that user-driven innovation plays an important role when involving this specific audience in the design of user experiences for museums.

The use of mobile interactive technology, in museum settings, has the potential of providing young audiences engaging and enjoyable learning activities. As museum visitors are increasingly looking for entertaining experiences inside museums, the dichotomy between learning and entertainment is blurring. In this paper, we present the Ocean Game, a treasure-hunt based mobile game in which 9-10 years old children search and collect a plethora of marine animals and learn about their key characteristics in the context of the Natural History Museum of Funchal (NHMF), Portugal. In this study, our aim was to fuse engagement and entertainment by offering a gaming experience in line with the learning goals of the museum. To evaluate the overall enjoyment and the information that was gained by the children, we compared the performance of players that were engaged with the Ocean Game with the performance of children taking a traditional guided tour. Analysis of the data supports our initial supposition, as children preferred to explore and enjoy the museum space through a gamified approach. Nevertheless, several shortcomings were found in the informal learning aspects of the game. Discussion and future work sections will tackle next steps regarding these issues.

Museum's audiences are increasingly looking for compelling experiences where, besides learning, engagement and enjoyment are key success factors. While gaming and storytelling are considered to be common approaches to engage audiences with a museum's collections, a formal comparison of the two has not been found in literature. In this paper, we present the design and comparative study of two distinct interventions, namely a mobile game and a mobile story that were designed to engage a young audience with the exhibit of the local natural history museum. Focusing on the same scientific content derived from the museum's collection, we compare the effects of both interactive experiences on a group of children. When comparing engagement, enjoyment and learning outcomes, we correlate results with data derived from observations and skin con-ductance biofeedback. The data collected so far suggest that children are 27% more excited when using the game application compared with the story driven one. Moreover, we find that children's excitement peaks when encountering selected artefacts presented in the museum exhibit. Finally, children's learning nearly doubled (44%) when using the game based experience versus the story. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of our findings and by proposing potential future improvements.

Museums promote cultural experiences through the exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially the “net generation”. According to the Falk model of visitor user experience, the visitor uses their visit experience to improve and change their sense of identity and thoughts of the museum along with, in a small but significant way, how society understands their sense of identity and other museums. According to the above model, we see our target group, teenagers, as experience seekers since this typical visitor’s type is usually motivated to collect an experience. In order to verify if this hypothesis is true, we created a series of focus groups with a total of 130 teenagers (15-17 years old) to gather their thoughts about museums and what they could add to a museum to make their visit more enjoyable. Through the notes gathered from the focus group above mentioned, we then validated our assumption that teenagers of 15-17 of age could be related as experience seekers regarding a first tour to an interactive museum.

Teenagers are an understudied group within the Interaction Design and Children community. Museums and cultural heritage spaces offer solutions for young children but do not target teenagers in particular. Teens, are a large pool of potential museum audiences. They should be given a “voice” and involved early in the design process to maximize chances of involvement in the museum practices and offers, hence, it is crucial to study their interests and desires to deploy a high quality and enjoyable product. For these reason, we deployed several co-design sessions with a total of 155 teenage participants, in order to understand how would they prefer to engage with museum tours. The authors, based on Madeira island (Portugal), used the Natural History Museum of Funchal as a case study. The participants were asked to ideate a mobile museum experience that they would enjoy. Through qualitative analysis, we gathered insights regarding six main themes that they reported as prompts in order to visit the Natural History Museum of Funchal, such as 1) gaming, 2) interactions, 3) localization, 4) social media, 5) aspects of the museum studied, and 6) photos. These findings are preliminary and still need testing and validation.

The contribution of this paper is centred around the qualitative data research conducted from several co-design sessions deployed with 155 teenage participants aged 15-19. The participants were asked to ideate a mobile museum experience that they would enjoy by writing and drawing about it. For this paper, we go over the thematic analysis applied to the results gathered as well as reporting the challenges faced and our attempts to overcome them. However, this work is still preliminary and will make use of this workshop to improve it.

Teenagers have been identified as an audience group that is often excluded from museum curatorial strategies. One strategy to counteract this problem is to involve cultural heritage professionals (CHPs) in the design process of museum based digital experiences targeted at teens. In this paper, 12 CHPs from a local natural history museum took part in a co-design activity over 20 hours, aiming to create and deploy digital tours for teenagers aged between 16-19. We present the three prototypes that derived from these design sessions. These were then tested by both 12 CHPs and 12 teenagers separately, and we report on lessons learned from the evaluation of these prototypes by both groups.

Museums promote cultural experiences through exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially teenagers. Throughout this paper, we discuss teenagers as an important group to be considered within the Children-Computer Interaction field, and we report some techniques on designing with teens, in particular, arguing that participatory design methods can involve teenagers in the design process of technology for museums. For this purpose, we conceptualized, designed and deployed a co-design activity for teenagers (aged 15-17), where teenagers together with a researcher jointly created and designed a medium fidelity prototype. For this case study, participants were divided into groups and invited to think and create games and story plots for a selected museum. All the prototypes were made by the participants with the support and guidance of the researcher and the Aurasma software, an augmented reality tool.

While museums are making great efforts in updating their communication and engagement strategies to include a wide variety of publics, teenagers (15-19) are still identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum's curatorial strategies. As consequence, this audience appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer. Our installation, deployed at the Natural History Museum of Funchal (NHMF), in Portugal, makes use of mobile interactive technologies and gaming strategies to promote more engaging museum experiences for teenage visitors. Memories of Carval-hal's Palace: Haunted Encounters is a location-based game that prompts teenagers to uncover the science in the museum, through investigating the site, which is presented as haunted. In order to complete the quest, the audience needs to find and collect scientific information about specific exhibits while interacting with their Augmented Reality (AR) three-dimensional (3D) models. The audience's interactions with the museum exhibits are rewarded with pieces of a map, which when completed, will guide them to the hidden scientific library where they can finally unlock the mysteries they have been trying to solve.