The Ocean Game: Measuring children’s engagement and factual learning with an indoor location treasure-hunt game in a museum setting

The adoption mobile interactive technology in museum settings has created novel ways of engaging young audience in engagement and enjoyable learning activities. As museum visitors increasingly look for entertaining experiences inside museums, the dichotomy between learning and entertainment is disappearing. 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. Through this work, we aimed at fusing engagement and entertainment offered by gaming, with the learning goals of museums. To evaluate the overall enjoyment and the factual knowledge gained by the children, we compared Ocean Game players’ performance with the performance of children taking a traditional guided tour. Analysis of the data supports our initial supposition, where 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.