CLASSic Art
Rijksmuseum Treasure Hunt!
Enhance the learning from a museum class trip with an engaging and fun game system.

This project was undertaken as part of my exchange semester in HKU, Utrecht. This is a group project where I was responsible for the design decisions.
The brief was to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual world using a game. We have built an engaging game system for the children to enjoy their Museum visits to be able to appreciate art in their day to day lives.
The project focuses on Learning, Gamification, Value in Art Appreciation Education
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Research

Ideation
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The Place and the environment
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Player Research
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Subject Area; Art Appreciation
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Requirements
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Insights

Game System
Design



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Interactive puzzles and the game system design
Content strategy and booklet design

The Process
02

The Place
For this project, we selected the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which is the national museum of the Netherlands. Its world-famous masterworks from the Dutch Golden Age include the Milkmaid by Vermeer and Rembrandt's Night Watch. The Rijksmuseum itself is also a masterpiece. In 80 galleries, 8,000 objects tell the story of 800 years of Dutch art and history, from the Middle Ages to Mondrian. Every year, over 2.5 million visitors travel through the ages and experience a feeling of beauty and a sense of time.






03

Children & Museums
A Museum is a pandora's box of knowledge and human wisdom, which often intrigues children.:
A museum has tangible evidence of humankind and its surroundings, presented in an interdisciplinary and humanistic manner.
Increases multi-cultural reasoning. They get a chance to empathize with different personal experiences.
A museum is where they get exposed to art, history, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy all at once.


Child Development
For this study, we have considered the age group of 9-12 as in this age. There is a shift in cognitive, emotional, and social development. The children start:
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Associating to a group's identity
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Awareness of more real-world problems
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Friendship and group work increases
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The sense of peer pressure increases
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Enjoy longer attention spans.

Insight:
Students can interpret museum artifacts with a fresh perspective at this age, and this experience will have a more prolonged impact on their lives.

Pain Points
Observations and recollection of museum trips from children led to the following key insights:
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Passive information leads to boredom.
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The information is not relatable.
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Attention span is too low to get the details.
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The guide/educator does not give individual attention.
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Intimidating environment and information
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The class eventually gets divided into the social groups they already have back in their classrooms, leading to more skew of communication and interactions.



Insight:
The system should appeal to the least interested and least participatory students. It should be interactive and relatable.


Keywords:
Boredom
Information overload
Relatability
Interactions with the guide

04
Potential area for the design system
Museum
Type

Museum Education and Art Appreciation
Ellie Caston provides insights in her paper on museum education. She proposes an excellent way to approach it by tailoring experiences based on the museum's type, educational component, and subject area the teachers and students want to learn.
Educational components in the museum

Highlighting the Dutch Golden Age through Golden Garry the mascot!
Subject Area: Art
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Art appreciation helps individuals develop creative thinking, helps to visualize problems, and boosts socio-emotional intelligence, mostly neglected in a school setting.
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Art appreciation can be applied to day-to-day matters and empowers one to find solace in it through various media.
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Art appreciation also involves a deeper look into the setting and historical implication and background of the piece, a study of its origins.
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Solution: The Game System Design
Input
A class on art appreciation
Help from teachers and friends
Supporting Features
Core Loop
Solve
Puzzles
Get
Scored
Gain
skills
Output
Activity based on the learnings
Competition
Layers
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The system needed to last beyond the application to make the museum visit to become meaningful. This can be possible with a teacher, classroom instructions, and an activity to end with.
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The system is made engaging using competitive elements which is seen to be enjoyed by students of the target age
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For the game to work, the core loop and the puzzles should be interesting enough. This is possible using AR application and non-trivia based puzzles.

The Application Design

The Playtest Results

Playtest was conducted in Immanuel School in Boskoop.
The main research questions we wanted to solve were as follows:
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How much help do the children require?
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We tried several setups where the children were given information before the game starts, during the game, and combinations of both.
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The children who were exposed to information during the game and before the game retained the most amount of information. This input was added in the application as well as in the system where the teacher has to take a class before the museum visit.
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How well can they retain the learnings? Are they able to apply it?
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A test was taken after they played the game. 4/5 children could solve the questions related to the art principles taught.
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Did they enjoy the process? Will they like to try it in the museum?
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29/31 children wanted to play this game again and would enjoy a museum visit with it!
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How will we design the difficulty of the puzzles?
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Some paintings (concepts) are easier to solve than others, so giving them different timers would be more well-adjusted for the scoring system
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