Enjoying Cultural Heritage
Thanks to Mobile Technology
maria Francesca costabile
IVU Lab, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Bari | [e-mail]
carmelo ardito
IVU Lab, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Bari | [e-mail]
rosa lanzilotti
IVU Lab, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Bari | [e-mail]
May + June 2010

It was early October, after the first month of
school, when my 12-year-old son came home and
told me about something very interesting he had
done that morning with his teachers and school-
mates. They had visited the archaeological park
of Monte Sannace, located about 40 miles south
of our hometown of Bari, Italy, where the ruins
of a Peucetian city date back to the ninth century
B.C. What he liked most was that instead of visit-
ing the park with a traditional guide, they played
a game very similar to a treasure hunt. The stu-
dents were divided up into groups of three or four
and given a list of tasks needed to discover some
key places, a list of clues, and a map of the park to
mark down the places once discovered. The first
group to discover all of the appropriate locations
was the winner. Once everyone had completed
the game, the game master, a member of Historia
Ludens, the association that developed the game,
urged them to reflect about their experience, the
history of the site, and all the fine details they
had a chance to appreciate while they explored
the park. When they returned to school the next
day, the teacher discussed the visit in more depth
with the class, in order to widen and reinforce the
historical information they had acquired.
I later spoke with my son’s teacher, who
explained Historia Ludens was created by some
researchers in the department of history at my
university. They have conducted a lot of research
on novel techniques to engage young students in
learning history and, having worked with hun-
dreds of classes, experienced the advantages of
replacing the traditional visit to historical sites
with playing educational games. My son’s teacher
had taken several of her classes on such visits
and is convinced of their educational validity;
she said that she and her colleagues would love
to make more visits, but they were not easy to
plan. Historia Ludens members were not always
available, and the limited school budget could not
always bear the cost.