Maike Groen

Since nowadays the meta process of digitalization is initiating changes in a great variety of areas, the German education system is also confronted with the challenge to keep pace. With regard to this, implementing software into school classes is a popular trend, e.g. in order to expand the repertoire of teaching methods and to meet the customs and needs of students. There is, however, still a lack of empirical studies investigating the outcome of such attempts. Therefor, we examined the educational potential of a specific app usable for teaching history.With the location-based augmented reality app Porta Praetoria C.C.A.A., users may discover the Roman roots of the city of Cologne using a playful approach. The app was developed at the Cologne Game Lab (CGL) in cooperation with the Roman-Germanic Museum Cologne. In our talk, we will introduce the evaluation we carried out when the prototype of the app was play-tested. The evaluation aimed on gathering exploratory impressions of two issues: the extent to which the software was working flawlessly in the current prototype stage and whether the game design and content are useful to reach the educational goals as planned by the CGL project team. In order to find out, an evaluative study with two student test groups was carried out, including surveys, focus group interviews and ethnographically accompanied play-testing experiences. In our talk, we will present and discuss the whole evaluation process including the selection of methods, the execution and the results.