Accessing Cultural Artifacts through Digital Companions: The Effects on Children's Engagement

This paper presents a study that explores how the introduction of a digital companion agent for a museum exploration game changes children's engagement with the presented artworks. To this end, a mobile application was developed featuring a monster agent that has eaten the artworks, which the children had now to find in the museum. Results show that in comparison to the paper-based version of the exploration game, children engaged in more interactions with the actual cultural artifacts and showed a significantly higher retention rate for details of the involved artworks.