Educational games to enhance museum visits for schools

Abstract

Museums usually look for new educational tools to enhance their exhibition. The Oteiza's museum in Navarre (Spain) especially gives importance to the dissemination of Jorge Oteiza's work to children at schools. Consequently, a didactics section was created with the objective of developing activities and relationship with schools. Jorge Oteiza represents one of the most important artists in the Spanish modern art and his sculptures stem from his proper philosophical concepts such as negative aesthetics via addition and subtraction, or activation of space and time. Such notions make the learning process at school complex. Thus, this study proposes a framework that aims to enhance the visit to the museum through a series of mini-games that shed light on these abstract concepts. Representative sculptures were selected and the corresponding activities were designed and developed in collaboration with the didactics section of the museum following a Co-Design approach. Then, the framework was tested by pupils from primary and secondary schools and students from educational practice. Therefore this paper provides a guideline to design educational games in collaboration with a museum, shows that mini educational games help students in learning artistic concepts and that motion-based touchless interfaces are not really adapted for classroom use.