A meta-analysis of serious mobile games to support museum’s informal educational

This paper uses a meta-analysis approach to explore the state-of-the-art of the use of mobile devices to support gamification for informal learning in museum contexts. This study addresses a complex interdisciplinary type of research where information technology is the catalyzer for a complex intersection of museology, information science and educational studies, and aims at helping game designers, museum educators and educational practitioners on their decision making concerning the selection of IoT components of serious mobile games. Specifically, the paper focuses on investigating IoT technological architectures and IoT technological affordances to serve the diversity of functions and features that can be used by different types of games. As a result, this paper presents 5 main categories of IoT technologies used for serious mobile games in museums and illustrates how each type of well-known types of games implements their functions and features through IoT. The paper recommends that for mobile technologies location aware architectures are crucial and the foundation for design and development of exploratory and geolocation serious mobile games for museums.