Abstract:

This paper describes and discusses the design and execution of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) with 183 children and adolescents which has happened during an event about games within a Museum of Science and Technology.

The organization and the development of the event and the creation of ARG "Ghosts in the Museum" involved a group of fifteen teenagers supported by teachers and researchers. The creation of the ARG demanded the development of an application (App) for mobile devices, using mixed reality and augmented reality elements. So the ARG was a pervasive and ubiquitous process in which a fictional narrative instigated and supported the complex exploration of a physical space. The initial narrative and the application promoted a "hunt the clues" activity related to specific experiments in the museum. The tracks of gamification process were guided by specific markers that, when scanned by the application, conjured up a ghost (Albert Einstein's 3D model) which presented the narrative and his quests about the experiments to start the challenge. Then the app invited the participants to deepen their explanation of the phenomenon observed in the museum experiences and, in the end, register their own scientific explanation. This project is a exploratory research with a qualitative approach, using mapping controversies as methodology and we choose many instruments to collect data as: the scripts generated by the group (design of narrative and the script of the app), online forms used to describe the profiles of the participants, observation, notes and records in photo, digital audio and video made by monitors, researchers and teachers who followed the groups of participating children and the application logs that stored the responses of participants for automated questions and the input text / image and / or sound asked for the end of each quest. The experiment produced important results about the design and management of the creative process, considering adolescents as protagonists of these processes as the relationship between teams formed of different kind of people. Our main focus was how they made themselves the construction of narratives from concepts and experiences presented in the Science Museum and how they were transformed into narratives and challenges in this creative process. The main result is a description of a process of identifying and negotiating differences in the design of the game, in which we found four types of process narratives: historical narratives, invented narratives, negociated stories and experience narratives; then we described each process. The experience was analyzed by immersion and enaction concepts, we studied the involvement of human and non-human actors (Actor-Network Theory) and the elements of hybrid narratives. This experience is relevant to disclose and explain a creative process in which the gamification and the process of creating collaborative and hybrid narratives can enhance the experience in museums and science education.

Keywords:

Gamification, Augmented Reality, Pervasive games, Science Educacion.