No abstract

Recent technological advances have greatly affected the museum practice, introducing new and innovative technological solutions for the creation of more interactive, multisensory and experiential museum exhibitions. Virtual reality applications allow museums' visitors to be fully immersed in interactive adventures and consequently, many museums are focusing their digital strategy on that direction. Meanwhile, the use of serious games technology in museum environments set new perspectives in the educational and the entertaining impact of museums' experiences. This contribution describes the principles and the guidelines that defined the digital museological design process of the Virtual Museum EPANASTASIS-1821, the development of which is based on the technologies of virtual reality and serious games. The paper indicates how the use of virtual reality and serious games in exhibition design can strengthen designers' creativity, enhance the interpretation dynamic of the exhibition and the memorization potential and lastly, create memorable museum experiences.

This study suggests a constructionist-learning framework to amplify students' engagement in introductory programming courses via a serious game that was held in Open Sim standalone server integrated with Scratch4OS. Fifty five (n=55) voluntary students from three different High schools have participated and experienced in Co.Co.I.A., a 3D mindtrap puzzle game. The empirical study findings indicated that behavioral engagement (attention, retention and energy expenditure for activity completion) does not only have a linear correlation with cognitive engagement (learning strategies for the construction of the knowledge domain), but it also has a positive nexus with emotional engagement (positive emotions and achievement orientation) in collaborative learning tasks, causing the reinforcement of the other two factors too.