Christos Sintoris

MuseumScrabble: Design of a Mobile Game for Children's Interaction with a Digitally Augmented Cultural Space

Mobile technology has created new possibilities for location-based playful learning experiences. This article describes the MuseumScrabble mobile game, aimed at children visiting a historical museum. The game requires that the players explore the museum and link abstract concepts with physical artefacts using a mobile device. The focus of this article is on the interaction design process and the subsequent observations made during field evaluation of the game. Design principles that guide the development of such a game are presented and concern playfulness, learning, social interaction, physical aspects of the game and flow between physical and digital space. This article explores how these design principles are reflected in the study and how problem-solving strategies and collaboration and competition patterns are developed by children in this multi-player educational game.

Design guidelines for location-based mobile games for learning

The objective of this course, is to introduce participants to location-based games and the challenges relating of designing such games for children. Key characteristics of this game genre are introduced first, followed by a design framework and a set of design guidelines. Examples of location-based games will be presented and typical design patterns as extracted from previous workshops will be discussed. Typical course participants include interaction designers, game designers and developers, practitioners and researchers interested in location-based games and mobile learning.

A survey on tools for end user authoring of mobile applications for cultural heritage

Effective and efficient approaches are required in order to develop and maintain cultural heritage applications and services that meet user requirements and expectations. This is particularly relevant to cultural heritage mobile applications which support diverse usage scenarios among a variety of stakeholders and diverse contexts of use. In this context, a promising approach is to engage non-technical cultural heritage experts in using end user authoring tools for creating mobile applications for cultural heritage. To this end, a plethora of such end user authoring tools has been proposed. In this paper, we provide a survey of such tools by emphasizing on approaches which allow end users to assign geo-location tags to multimedia information of cultural heritage. The purpose of this review paper is to categorize some of these approaches and to conclude with promising directions for future research in this area.

Do you remember that building? Exploring old Zakynthos through an augmented reality mobile game

This paper presents a mobile augmented reality application, that was designed with the objective of visitors, to experience the historical center of old Zakynthos, Greece, that was destroyed after an earthquake, and allow the users to re-live the atmosphere and life of the historic place. Special attention is given to the mental model of the landmarks developed by the users after interacting with the application, discussing some of the observed flaws of this model.

Designing Pervasive Games for Learning

Pervasive games have been proposed as a suitable way to support learning, especially in places rich in information, as for example museums and cultural heritage sites. This paper reports on the work performed to identify guidelines that help designers in developing games able to provide an effective learning experience in such contexts. Such guidelines complement other proposals available in the literature. The presented contribution is a first step of a wider work aimed at deepening our understanding of pervasive educational games, with a special emphasis on games in the cultural heritage domain, in order to inform the designers of such challenging applications.

Delivering multimedia content in enabled cultural spaces

In the context of a project involving development of an electronic guide and an educational application for a historical cultural museum, we defined an architecture that permits efficient and effective co-existence of objects in the physical space and digital multimedia content. Handheld devices were used for mediating the process. The prime consideration of the developed architecture was the optimal delivery of multimedia content, mainly in the form of audio but also video and text, to users of handheld devices, which raises an interesting number of issues both in terms of technology used and human-computer interaction.

TaggingCreaditor: A tool to create and share content for location-based games for learning

This paper describes TaggingCreaditor, a content authoring tool for location-based games. This tool is implemented both as a mobile and desktop application, which offers the possibility to end users to easily create, edit and/or mix content for these games. TaggingCreaditor has been designed to support a number of location-based games for learning in cultural heritage sites, based on the idea of connections between digital content and the physical world. Thus, the aim of the reported research was to create a tool that can support the users to customize these games by creating content in the form of textual and multimedia information that can be linked with specific locations or objects indoors and outdoors. In this paper we outline the design rationale and discuss the findings of an initial evaluation study.

On establishing contact with cultural objects: The role of a location based game in supporting visitors to engage with contemporary art

In this paper we discuss the difficulty of museum visitors to engage and relate with cultural objects focusing mainly on pieces of contemporary art. We present Taggling a location based game designed to support learning in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art. The results of a qualitative user study with volunteers helped us to outline the learning potential of the game and supported us to gain an insight on the integration of the game in the educational activities of the museum. Furthermore, our data analysis showed that the game experience revolves around revisiting the same artwork and viewing it with the help of curatorial information constructed in the form of tags, casting visitors in an active role and helping them to engage with the exhibits.

Out of the Box: Using Gamification Cards to Teach Ideation to Engineering Students

This paper reports on innovative teaching interventions in the frame of Internet of Things (IoT) design ideation classes. A card-based gamification approach has been applied in two different engineering masters courses. The participating students had already a good understanding of IoT technologies and they were asked to produce innovative designs by using them. We examine here the produced design ideas and the students’ perception of the collaborative design process and tools. The paper discusses broader issues relating to applicability of design- and ideation-focused gamification methods in the context of engineering education and the effect they have on collaborative design and innovation.

Design of Location-Based Mobile Games: Introduction

The objective of this course, is to introduce the participants to location-based games and to the challenges relating to designing them. Key characteristics of this new genre are introduced first, followed by a design framework and a set of design guidelines. Examples of location-based games will be presented and typical design patterns as extracted from previous workshops will be discussed. This course has already been run in the frame of several conferences and summer schools (Sintoris 2015). Typical course participants include interaction designers, game designers and developers, practitioners and researchers interested in location-based games. The course is presented by researchers who have been involved in designing and studying human interaction with location-based games for many years. Examples of games developed by the course organizers include MuseumScrabble, RebelsVsSpies, Taggling, etc.