GuidiGO – a platform for museums and storytellers
I work at GuidiGO, a Franco-American company whose focus is to bring culture and heritage to everyone by reinventing the traditional guided tour on mobile devices. GuidiGO is a platform that allows every museum or storyteller to create guided tours with both rich content and geolocalized games using the most advanced abilities of smartphones and tablets. This platform includes a dedicated CMS which is as easy to use as a blog editor. One of our main concerns is children and how to keep them interested during a tour when most of them find museums and heritage sites pretty boring. This raises another question: how to find the right balance between fun and quality content?
A screen from GuidiGO featuring a child’s drawings.
Since GuidiGO makes the publication of cultural games more accessible, some new experiments quickly popped to our minds. When I was at school, I remember visiting exhibitions, pen and paper in hands, filling in forms, ticking boxes and drawing architecture details. Today, teachers have a more powerful way to get their students’ attention: they can prepare a school tour by creating a cultural game that will include audio storytelling, images and videos, but also appealing challenges based on image recognition and augmented reality.
Giving children the tools to make their own game
Instead of giving children a content made by their teacher, why not involve them right from the game creation stage? At the time of this experiment, I was still a student in history, heritage and education. I wanted to test if such project could awake the children’s curiosity for their local heritage. I conducted the experiment with a fellow student, Elsa, who is also working on bringing archeology to the young masses. We worked with a group of 26 children aged 7 to 9. First, we took them to an exhibition in a local museum to make them discover, on tablets, some gaming experience we had created with GuidiGO. Then, Elsa proposed an active guided tour of the city focused on Antiquity and the Middle Ages. At the end of this first day, there was the deal: now that they had tested the app and learned a lot about their city’s history, they had to create their own game to pass on this knowledge to other children.
At first they thought it was impossible. We tried to reassure them and make them comfortable by establishing a few simple rules: anyone willing to participate could do it, there would be no obligation, and no idea or answer would be considered as wrong or stupid. They quickly understood that when you need to be creative, e.g. to design the game process, the craziest idea can sometimes turn out to be a good starting point.
We began with a brainstorming session, engaging the whole group, to imagine the global story, define the path in the city and the number of stops. A lot of great ideas came from the children who finally settled on this simple scenario: one of them, Caesar, shares his family name with an historic character Elsa told them about during the tour. From there, they developed a story where you have to walk throughout the city in Caesar’s shoes, trying to find his ancestor’s daughter after a time travel. At each stop visited, you meet a relevant character who explains what the place used to be and who challenges you. Challenges are rewarded with clues allowing to reach the next stop.
A student using GuidiGO
After this first stage, the teacher divided the classroom into groups of 3 or 4, each with the responsibility of creating one stop. This was great teamwork since everyone did something; and there was a lot to do! The children first wrote the dialogue between Caesar and their character. Then they played it in front of microphones and drew the scene. When it came to imagining challenges, they managed to diversify them pretty well, not sticking to the obvious MCQs. Some group used the image recognition feature, asking you to search for a piece of architecture and then scan it to make sure you found the right one. Another group invited you to search answers on some urban heritage signs. Once they had the audio files, images and challenges ready, the children uploaded the whole content themselves in GuidiGO Studio. They eventually downloaded their cultural game on tablets and tested it with their friends and families.
The children got really interested in their hometown’s heritage and their parents were happy to see them so excited about a history project. The teachers could also witness a new motivation and at the end of the project, you couldn’t tell which children were usually shy and reluctant to participate in class. The results perfectly match the benefits Project Based Learning advocates cry out for.
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