Designing Pda Mediated Educational Activities for a Museum Visit

The aim of the research presented in this paper is to design a class of exploratory, constructivist and collaborative educational activities, mediated by handheld computers for a museum. Design decisions are influenced by pedagogical, technological and contextual issues which shape the design space. Our goal is to create a class of activities that give the students the opportunity to harvest information from artifacts that provided traditionally little interaction opportunities, while collaborate and actively explore the museum area in a personal way. To clarify our decisions, which constitute the proposed approach for constructivist educational activities using handheld computers, we outline the general setting, the interaction model presented to the students in order to use efficiently the mobile devices and the pedagogical goals under the prism of activity theory which drives our decisions. A typical example of our approach is discussed in the paper: the ‘inheritance activity’ was introduced to young students visiting a Cultural-Historical Museum. Results of the study helped us to refine our design decisions and are discussed in detail in the following.