TouchTomb: a Tangible Installation Gamifies Cultural Learning in a Museum
How can we teach children cultural heritage values in a museum context?
TouchTomb is a 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 wall of ancient Egyptian tomb-chapel (i.e. Neferirtenef tomb-chapel) on a 1:1 scale.
Our field study at the Art and History Museum in Brussels involved 14 school visits with a total number of 190 school pupils (from 10 to 14 years old). We designed TouchTomb to be affordable, robust, easy to replace, and most importantly to engage one guided school visit, which consists of approximately 15 pupils, for a maximum of 15 minutes.
TouchTomb consists of physical, life-sized replica wall of a particular section of the interior west wall of the tomb-chapel as an interactive, tangible interface. The wall hosted three distinct game setups. Each game setup was specifically designed to communicate a specific type of tacit heritage information: architectural, historical, and artistic.
Publication
Eslam Nofal, Georgia Panagiotidou, Rabee M. Reffat, Hendrik Hameeuw, Vanessa Boschloos, and Andrew Vande Moere. 2020. Situated Tangible Gamification of Heritage for Supporting Collaborative Learning of Young Museum Visitors. J. Comput. Cult. Herit. 13, 1, Article 3 (February 2020), 24 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3350427
