Designing for cultural learning and reflection using IoT serious game approach

Previous studies have highlighted the difficulty that designers face in designing interactive systems that will help visitors learn and reflect upon cultural issues in support of museums’ new roles of shaping cultural identify and community building. In this paper, we report a study to explore the potential of Internet of things (IoT) serious games to support cultural learning and reflection by incorporating five IoT-mediated interactive exhibits—an online trading game, an interactive grinder and Goldsmith simulators, a lantern design and a virtual house decoration station. We present design goals to meet the aim and evaluate our approach through a museum study. The results show significant learning gains from pre-test to post-test, and our interview analyses indicate some evidence of participants engaging in all levels of reflection. From our findings, we discuss the design goals and recommend design guidelines for future IoT serious games to support reflective learning in museums.