The Impact Of Game-Based Design On Visitor Engagement With A Science Museum App

Ask Dr. Discovery is a National Science Foundation-funded study addressing the need for affordable, ongoing, large-scale museum evaluation while investigating innovative ways to encourage museum visitors to engage deeply with museum content. To realize these aims, we are developing and implementing a mobile app with two parts: 1) a front-end virtual scientist called Dr. Discovery (Dr. D) for use by museum visitors that doubles as an unobtrusive data-gatherer and 2) a back-end analytics portal to be mined by museum staff, evaluators, and researchers. With a partnership between Arizona State University (ASU), the Arizona Science Center (ASC), and the Arizona Museum of Natural History (AZMNH), we are developing this app to function as a platform for STEM informal education, research, and data-driven decision-making by museum staff. In this paper, we describe the impact of a game version of the Dr. D app on visitor engagement with the app, specifically investigating whether visitors using the game version of Dr. D ask more questions of the app than visitors using a baseline non-game version.