Guidelines for Combining Storytelling and Gamification

While museums are often designed to engage and interest a wide variety of audiences, teenagers are a neglected segment. This PhD research in Digital Media explores how digital technologies can facilitate natural history museums in creating immersive museum experiences for teenagers (15-18 years old), especially through digital storytelling and gamification frameworks. This contribution would be a set of guidelines that will aid in designing interactive experiences inside these museums. So far, we have involved a total of 155 teens through co-design sessions, 130 in focus groups, and 98 in usability studies, as well as 3 museums, 12 curators, and 17 master students. Through qualitative analysis, our preliminary findings suggest that teenagers value gamification and storytelling elements when thinking about enjoyable museum tours, while curators value story-based narratives as the most prominent method to provide enjoyable museum experience for teens. Based on the findings identified, and in collaboration with the Madeira-ITI, two interactive mobile experiences targeted at teenagers were developed for the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal.