A Serious Game Design and Evaluation Approach to Enhance Cultural Heritage Understanding

One of the most promising means regarding the potential of supporting both, entertainment and learning, in cultural heritage sector are the Serious Games (SGs). During last decades, Cultural Heritage Serious Games (CHSGs) are being developed with the use of different technologies, in order to facilitate learning of cultural heritage via an entertaining manner. Although, there are evidences about CHSGs effects, there is the need of extracting more reliable results about their effectiveness, meaning the extent to which the initial intentions achieved their purpose. Regarding CHSGs, this purpose is twofold, which means the measurements are as much about entertainment as learning. Moreover, there is the need of increasing evidences on CHSGs' effectiveness regarding higher-cognitive processes in learning. The aim of the present paper is to describe a CHSG design and evaluation approach, which is oriented to the enhancement CHSGs effectiveness in terms of entertaining and learning, as well as the extraction of more reliable results. Regarding learning aspects, the proposed approach focuses on extracting results about cultural heritage understanding. The suggested approach will be applied in a CHSG for the understanding of the Roman Forum of Thessaloniki, Greece.