Play in the museum: Designing game-based learning environments for informal education settings

Interest in digital games for education has grown significantly over the past decade. Much of the work on game-based learning has focused on formal education settings, such as K-12 classrooms. However, recent advances in game technologies have enabled deployments in a broader range of settings, including informal learning contexts such as museums and science centers. In this paper, we describe the design of FUTURE WORLDS, a gamebased learning environment for sustainability education in museums. FUTURE WORLDS leverages strategy game designs, interactive narratives, and surface computing to create storycentric collaborative investigations of environmental sustainability. FUTURE WORLDS’ face-to-face collaborative gameplay unfolds in rich 3D virtual environments rendered on a multi-display surface-computing-based exhibit. In this paper, we discuss design criteria and interaction patterns for game-based learning in museums. In addition, we describe the iterative development process used to create FUTURE WORLDS, including successive prototyping and museum deployments. We report lessons learned, as well as empirical findings, from a pilot study in the project’s partner museum. Results suggest that FUTURE WORLDS has positive impacts on students’ conceptualizations of sustainability and fosters key learning processes targeted in informal science education, such as sparking interest and engagement, as well as fostering scientific reasoning.