Natural Europe educational games suite: Using structured museum-data for creating mobile educational games

This paper presents a suite for configuring and deploying mobile, location-based educational games for natural history museums. We propose a novel approach that uses structured museum-data as game-content and present an initial study thereof. The overall aim is to enable domain-experts, like teachers or museum educators, to create educational games for off-the-shelf mobile phones without requiring neither bespoke programming skills nor expensive setups. Our approach builds on the combination of two strands of work: 1.) structuring and providing museum-assets as linked data, and 2.) template-based content creation for mobiles games. This is thought to facilitate reuse of existing data and foster its maintenance on the one hand, as well as providing a timely and engaging mobile interface to museum content on the other hand. Our study is based on two rounds of user-tests with think-aloud observations and questionnaires, and on the developers' notes and reflections that stem from introductory workshops at four natural history museums from the Natural Europe project consortium. We found that both, the workflow for content-creation and the mobile end-user app have high hedonic as well as pragmatic qualities. Thus, the test results indicate that our approach might provide guidance for future work in this domain