Fourteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

While at their beginning as cultural institutions the role of museums was to raise the public’s level of education and culture, nowadays their role has become more diversified. This paper investigates aspects of learning in museums through entertainment. Fun has a positive effect on motivation levels, determining what we learn and how much we retain. Learning isn’t a one-off event. It requires repetition and dedication. If the experience is fun, learners will stay curious and keep coming back for more. The success of the games developed over the past years in the Aquincum Museum - such as scavenger hunt games in playful narratives - underlines the significance of the entertainment and edutainment within the walls of cultural institutions. Mystery stories are favored for this type of games and offer a new context in which museum exhibits are integrated. In contextualized scavenger hunts visitors as players can connect the exhibits with broad scientific fields (such as mathematics, models, communication) and they have the chance to engage with the details of some exhibits and to think more broadly about multiple exhibits (combining depth and breadth).