18 October 2013

First mockup of forthcoming Cultural Heritage educational games presented by Europeana Creative

Screenshots of of the first two mockups developed

Europeana Creative is a project that aims to "enable and promote greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by Europe's creative industries". 
The project itself is based on the collection of digitised objects indexed and made available through Europeana platform.

Within the project, an important focus is given to the creation of actual application that helps to spread and re-use the huge collection of digitised objects indexed in the Europeana platform. Five innovative pilot applications based on five themes – natural history education, history education, tourism, social networks and design – will showcase Europe's cultural heritage in innovative applications.

The first mock-ups, presented to the Europeana Creative's partners during the last project meeting, are two educational games developed by Exozet and Semantika under the coordination of the Prague National Museum.

According to Europeana Creative's blog

One of the pilots will be an adventure game, a mix of a “point and click” adventure and a hidden object game. The user will take the role of an explorer of a natural history museum, solving different puzzles to unveil a big secret.

The educational factor of the game is in the need for the user to learn about history, science, evolution etc. while solving different puzzles. They will see real content from museum collections through the diverse digital objects that come via Europeana (from crabs to spiders or dinosaur’s bones).

The other pilot, more targeted at early primary school children, consists of a digital card memory game and quizzes, which will present high quality content from different themes in the natural history domain, also directly obtained via Europeana.

 

Both of the pilots are developed to perform at their best with mobile devices, allowing thus an interactive environment which can be replicated by museums and institutions willing to implement those concepts in house.

During the whole project life, six products will be developed which aim to inspire the cultural and creative industries. Soon a series of challenges will be announced on the Europeana Creative website, which will be open for creative industries, developers and enthusiasts with innovative ideas in the field. 
As described in the project's website, "while the pilot applications developed in Europeana Creative provide inspiration, a series of open innovation challenge events will directly involve creative industries and offer them support".

If you want to know more about those challenges and get an in-depth view on the project, check the Europeana Creative official website.

Stefano Sbarbati