Archaeological scavenger hunt on mobile devices: From e-education to e-Business: A triple adaptive mobile Application for supporting experts, tourists and children

Abstract

This paper reports on the design and development of a mobile application to support archaeological education and to raise awareness for our cultural heritage by making use of the powerful notion of play. The application reads information from Quick-Response Codes (QR-Codes) on paper sheets, which can be placed directly at the points of interest. Users can now follow an archaeological scavenger hunt along those points of interest. They start at one point of interest and get hints on how to find the others. This makes use of collective intelligence, i.e. using the mobile devices amongst the group of users as social communicators in order to get specific information on the target; through these additional discussions both the one who states questions and the one who gets the answer can learn incidentally. Although this App has been developed for educational purposes, it can be used just for fun, e.g. for a children's birthday party: Hiding treasures in various spots in the garden and delivering information on QR-codes showing hints on how to find the spots. Moreover, the use of the ArchaeoApp in the Tourism modus, is a challenge for e-Business.