The integration of augmented reality and the concept of sticker album collection for informal learning in museums

Abstract

Informal learning can have an important role in today’s Education but, to be effective, it should be contextualized individually for each learner, and situated to enhance experience. Museums have invaluable collections of assets that are in display and curators use their knowledge to engage the audience. Museums are places where informal learning can be fostered to engage the students and provide opportunities for situated learning. Pervasive systems, that take into account context, from both the learner and the location, have a good potential to promote this effectiveness in a gamified process that transforms the regular museum exploration into an engaging experience that provides learning opportunities at the appropriate time and place. In this paper, we propose a gamified approach based on the concept of sticker album collection and its integration in an Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application. The concept of sticker album collection is quite familiar to most people, mainly from their youth, and is the main dynamic of the gamification design, engaging the learner to collect more stickers and progress in the exploration of the museum. As a pervasive solution, we do not use physical support, but instead, a mobile application to provide the learning experiences by uncovering the stickers using AR over the museum collection, in order to enhance the knowledge transfer and rewarding. We present a prototype developed for a boat museum where, digital stickers are obtained by overcoming challenges in the context of the exploration of the boats in the museum. Furthermore, we provide two evaluations fromexperts: a preliminary evaluation of user experienceand a gamification evaluation using the Octalsysframework. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.