Guidance in museum virtual tours: The impact of a gamified mobile guide on elementary students' learning experiences

This randomized between-groups experiment examined how guidance modality shapes students' learning in a virtual museum tour. Fifty-six students (grades 4-7) were alternately assigned to one of two conditions; a gamified, well-structured, task-based mobile guide providing immediate feedback, and a paper guide offering partially structured, text-based prompts without built-in feedback. After completing the tour, students were assessed on museum knowledge, three dimensions of museum learning experience (engagement, meaningful learning, emotional connection), and overall satisfaction. The mobile guide yielded significantly higher museum knowledge, greater meaningful learning, and higher satisfaction than the paper guide; differences in engagement and emotional connection were not observed. These findings indicate that guidance packaged with game mechanics, tight task structuring, and instant feedback can compensate for typical shortcomings of virtual tours and better support learning than text-only guidance. We discuss implications for the design of technology-enhanced guidance in virtual museum environments and recommend future factorial studies to disentangle the unique contributions of gamification, feedback, and delivery medium. However, these results should be interpreted in light of contextual limitations such as significant design imbalance between the richly structured mobile guide and the minimally supported paper guide, device diversity, linear navigation constraints, and the additional cognitive demands of using the mobile guide for the first time.