Stamp-On: A Mobile Game for Museum Visitors

Ayako Ishiyama

, Fusako Kusunoki

, Ryohei Egusa

, Keita Muratsu

Shigenori Inagaki

and Takao Terano

Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan

Kobe University, Hyogo, Japan

Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kanagawa, Japan

Keywords: Mobile Guidance, iPad Mini, Learning Game, Tangible, Explanatory Contents.

Abstract: This paper proposes Stamp-On, a mobile guidance aid for museum visitors. Stamp-On equips a tangible

interface in the form of a stamp, which is used as an input-device for visitors to show explanations on a

mobile device such as an iPad. The explanations will give the corresponding information about exhibiting

items with additional questions. By touching the screen of the mobile device with the Stamp-On near the

corresponding item, she or he will get visual information. We have conducted a preliminary experiment

with participants of school teachers in order to evaluate the effectiveness as an exhibition guidance system.

The results have suggested that Stamp-On system is an attractive and effective learning aid for elementary

school children visitors of a museum.

1 INTRODUCTION

Conventional mobile guidance systems in a museum

consist of tailored sound- or video-based equipments.

Therefore, their maintenance effort costs much.

Once they have been set up, it was difficult to deal

with the visitor diversity in terms of ages,

knowledge, and/or interests. To resolve these

difficulties, there have been an increasing number of

studies in recent years on mobile guidance systems,

which aims at flexible responses to various kinds of

visitors. Such systems usually combine location

sensors and mobile devices such as cell phones,

smart phones, or iPads (Cahill et al., 2011; Kusunoki

et al., 2005; Raptis et al., 2005; Rose et al., 2009;

Suzuki et al., 2009; Yamaguchi et al., 2010; Yatani

et al., 2004).

The interfaces of those existing mobile devices

are, however, hard to be used by every visitor, in

particular, young children. For instance, although

their operation methods look simple, most of the

operations require multiple steps to display the

contents. Furthermore, operating and maintenance

costs of such conventional guidance systems will

cause severe issues from the management of the

museums. To cope with these these issues, in this

paper, we propose Stamp-On system, a learning

game which has a tangible interface that emphasizes

the physical form as a novel design of an input

device for a mobile guidance aid in a museum.

Stamp-On is able to handle visitors’ diversity using

contents made up of videos and photographs. Stamp-

On system also contains an interface in a stamp

form, inspired by actual stamps. The paper provides

principles and overview of Stamp-On system, and

gives a preliminary experimental results of the

usability of the stamp form interface.

2 OVERVIEW OF Stamp-On

Stamp-on is a stand alone system run on an iPad

with the newly developed stamp-shaped interface.

The stamp equips plural small metal chips as are

used in stylus pens. The metal patterns represent

coded information related to the object to be

explained. Compared with the exhibition support

system in the literature in the references, Stamp-on

is characterized by the following unique features:

1) As all the information is held in the iPad appl

ications, it is not necessary to use any wireless

networks.

2) To identify the exhibited object, they are only

required to push the corresponding stamp on

200

Ishiyama A., Kusunoki F., Egusa R., Muratsu K., Inagaki S. and Terano T..

Stamp-On: A Mobile Game for Museum Visitors.

DOI: 10.5220/0004943602000205

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 200-205

ISBN: 978-989-758-022-2

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

iPAD. If we would use wireless networks, to

distinguish different objects, the distances

among them would keep more than one meter.

3) It is easy to set up at any exhibited space

without special IT equipments.

Furthermore, compared with the research by Suga, et

al., in which they utilize pipe shaped devices in

order to move 3-d objects, the stamp interface in this

paper is very easy to make. Stamp-on is the first

system for such exhibition support task domains.

2.1 The Stamp Shape Interface

Figure 1 gives an overview of Stamp-On system. A

tangible object in the shape of a stamp is physically

attached to an exhibit (the rocks in Figure 1). By

pressing this stamp on the iPad mini screen, the iPad

mini acquires an ID, then the contents corresponding

to this ID are displayed. The contents are installed

on the iPad mini. The most important and unique

feature of Stamp-On is its exceedingly simple

content-matching by the attached stamp. Moreover,

there will be no misidentification of exhibits as the

stamp is physically attached to the exhibit.

Figure 1: The overview of the Stamp-On system.

The stamp uses multi-touch technology used by the

iPad and/or Android devices. For this study, 10

electrification patterns are configured on the bottom

of the stamps to represent the corresponding IDs.

When a user take the stamp and presses it on the

iPad mini screen, the iPad mini detects the pattern,

thus displays the contents associated with the exhibit

(Figure. 2). As illustrated in Figure 3, the stamp is

30 mm high with a 40 mm * 100 mm rectangular

base. To distinguish the top and bottom of the stamp,

the top has engraved lettering. As an electric current

runs through the stamp, aluminium tape has been

used to the bottom as well as on the sides, as they

come in contact with human skin.

Figure 2: Relation among Stamp-on tags and iPad

contents.

Figure 3: The shape of the stamp interface (upper photo)

and patterns embedded in the bottom of the stamp (lower

photo).

2.2 Explanation Contents

Figure 4 shows examples of the explanation

contents incorporated in Stamp-On system. The

contents consist of interactive explanations as

Stamp-On:AMobileGameforMuseumVisitors

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quizzes. The quizzes are developed to identify nine

typical types of rocks found around the Hyogo

Prefecture, Japan. We are currently making contents

good for school children. As shown in Figure 4, the

touchable area with the same size of the bottom of

the stamp is displayed on the iPad mini screen. By

pressing the stamp on the touchable area, its ID is

recognized, then corresponding contents depending

on the ID are displayed. Specifically, the name of a

rock the visitor observes and its characteristics are

shown on the screen of the mobile device, then, the

visitor is requested to find the rock among the

exhibited items.

When the visitor presses the stamp on the

rectangular ‘reply’ box on the content displayed, the

answer is judged to be either right or wrong. If the

answer is correct, further detailed information on

that rock is displayed. Pressing the stamps and

answering the quizzes encourages the visitor to have

a look around and examine the rocks in more detail.

The questions have predetermined points and

corresponding hints. When a user refers to the hint,

however, her/his points are decreasing by the points.

After answering each question, a user are requested

whether she/he would like to add the stone

information to her/his collections, if she/he would

have enough points to get. Accordingly, let her/him

observe the exibit better to avoid to decrease her/his

points.

The software running on the iPad mini was

implemented with Adobe Flash CS6.

3 PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENT

We have conducted a preliminary experiment on the

usability of the Stamp-On system through

questionnaires and interviews with elementary

school teachers. We asked teachers to evaluate the

system by imagining an educational trip to the

museum for school children.

3.1 Questionnaire-based Evaluation

3.1.1 Purpose

The Stamp-On system evaluation specifically

focused on the stamp usages.

Figure 4: Parts of iPad Contents.

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3.1.2 Participants

The participants of the experiment are 15 elementary

school teachers (45.4 years old on average) taking

part in a workshop held by the Hyogo Prefecture

Science Museum, Japan (Hyogo Prefecture Museum

of Nature and Human Activities).

3.1.3 Task

The questionnaires are designed to evaluate the

usability of the system. For all questions related to

the usability, the participants are asked to grade five

possible responses ranging from ‘I completely

agree’ to ‘I completely disagree.’

The questions use the term ‘game’, because the

Stamp-On system is presented as a game, with

which one has to find the rocks based on the

provided hints. Six questions focused on the stamp

as a tangible interface.

These questions include such ones as “Did you

think this game was interesting?”, “Do you consider

the system of pressing a stamp tied to an exhibit

onto an iPad mini a good one?”, “Would you want to

use this kind of system as a teaching resource?”,

“Did you find the way the stamp was used easy to

understand?”.

3.1.4 Procedure

The experiment is conducted as a game, by which

participants are required to find nine types of rocks

out of the twelves ones on a display (Figure 5). The

time required was approximately 20 minutes.

Participants are then asked to answer individual

questions on the usability. This took approximately

3 minutes. The evaluation experiment was

conducted on August 22, 2013.

Figure 5: Snapshot of the experiment.

3.1.5 Results

Table 1 shows the head-count distribution of the

responses. Most participants respond a positive

answers for all questions. We investigate response

trends after separating the responses obtained from

the questionnaire surveys into two groups: positive

responses including “completely agree” and “agree”

and negative responses including “somewhat

disagree” and “completely disagree.” Fisher’s exact

tests (1×2) showed statistical significance at a 1%

level for the all items.

3.2 Post-Interview Evaluation

3.2.1 Purpose

The purpose is to obtain a qualitative results from

participantts regarding the effectiveness of the stamp

form interface of the Stamp-On system.

3.2.2 Participants and the Task

The participants were two randomly selected from

respondents of the previously mentioned

Table 1: Stamp-On system usability test results.

5 4 3 2 1

(1) Did you think this was an interesting game?

11 3 0 1 0

(2) Do you think this game will be popular with children?

7 5 2 1 0

(3) Did you think the system where you press a stamp tied to an exhibit onto an

iPad mini is a good one?

7 6 2 0 0

(4) Do you think you would want to use this kind of system where exhibits and

device are linked as a teaching resource?

7 6 2 0 0

(5) Did you find the way the stamp was used easy to understand?

5 6 3 0 1

(6) Did you think pressing the stamp on the device was fun?

10 5 0 0 0

p<.01, 5= completely agree, 1= completely disagree

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203

questionnaire. The evaluation task is to ask for

opinions about the system’s effectiveness. The

question is given: “What impression do you receive

after using the stamp?”

3.2.3 Procedure

We have conducted semi-structured one-on-one

interviews, just after the Stamp-On system

experiment. The interviews takes approximately 5

minutes per participant.

3.2.4 Results

Table 2 shows the results of the interview-based

survey. Firstly, positive answers (‘interesting’, ‘fun’)

are obtained from the participants. Some participan

emphasizes the significance of the interface when

they stand in front of the rocks, the exhibit, and

pressing the stamp on the device. The following

statements are given by them: “With the stamp, I

always stand in front of the rocks,” “Actually

touching the rock and then pressing the stamp is

easy to understand.” They indicate the stamp’s

potential as an effective intermediary between a

child and an exhibit.

4 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has describes the design principle of

Stamp-On system and its preliminary experiment.

The Stamp-On system is characterized by a tangible

interface in a stamp form, which is easy to use.

Results of the experiment have shown that the

Stamp-On system is an attractive and effective

learning aid for school children at a museum.

Our future work include the improvement of the

interface focussing on the stamp, further

experiments with school children, and development

of new contents and support functions for a variety

of visitors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported in part by JSPS the

Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (No.

24240100) and Grant-in-Aid for Challenging

Exploratory Research (No.

24650521)

Table 2: Participants’ replies in the interviews.

Participant A:

Firstly, I thought the system was interesting and

fun. Pressing a stamp on something, that kind of thing

is enjoyable. I think it is great that there are

movements involved, it will keep children interested

and I thought that it was enjoyable.

The important thing is that you have to stand in

front of the rocks to be able to do it, is it not? When

you use a finger, you can just tap anything while

looking at the rocks from afar, but this system has a

definite advantage because with the stamp, you have to

stand in front of the rocks and press it on the device.

Participant B:

Pressing a stamp on something is something

children like, as well as me, so my impression of the

stamp was that it was an interesting idea. Actually

touching the rocks and pressing the stamp that is there

is easy to understand, I thought.

Because you want to get the questions correct,

something you would not be able to do unless you

observe it in more detail, I think that the quiz allows

for even more in-depth learning.

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