Museums are increasingly being equipped with interactive technology. The main goal of using technology is to improve the museum-going experience of visitors. In this paper, we present the results of a study with an electronic quest through a museum aimed at children in the age of 10-12. We wanted to find out whether personalization of the quest effects enjoyment. For this purpose we involved an interactive multi-touch table in the experiment, which also offered the opportunity to add the element of collaboration. We compared a group that did the original nonpersonalized quest with a group that did the personalized quest. This last group interacted with the multi-touch table to personalize the quest before they started on it. No significant differences were found between the experimental groups. We did find many differences between the children of age 10-11 and those of age 11-12, on almost all measurements. On this aspect we present some methodical results about measuring enjoyment and intrinsic motivation with children of 10-12 years old.
Museums are a fertile ground for experimentations with edutainment applications conceived for mobile devices. However the design, implementation and maintenance of mobile multimedia guides is a time and resources consuming iterative process to which ideally all involved stakeholders should participate. Evaluation therefore is of outmost importance. Drawing from already published results and on site experience from DANAE project we define three categories of evaluation key points, under which all possible evaluation questions measuring the effectiveness of an edutainment application can be classified; we then match them with all involved stakeholders, mainly museums, their visitors and information technologies companies. Finally, we argue that the proposed taxonomy can be used for the classification of different evaluation questions so as to constitute a comprehensive and adjustable guide for evaluation purposes of applications for different and heterogeneous museum environments.
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