Historical and Heritage Education: Construction and Implementation of a Digital Tour of the Historical Heritage of Medieval Braga

This article presents a research study developed within the scope of the Master’s Degree in Cultural Heritage and is configured as a case study, aiming to build a practice within the scope of heritage education, focused on the Historic Center of the city of Braga, involving the built heritage of the medieval period. The study established relations with historical education and new information and knowledge technologies. In this sense, the research sought to analyze how the different audiences (school and non-school) interpret the medieval historical heritage of Braga at the level of historical evidence, using digital applications, as well as what relationship they establish between local heritage sources and their relevance for the understanding of local and national history and what significance is attributed to the «uses of heritage sources for the construction of historical knowledge and heritage awareness mediated by the digital applications used (QR codes and Google Form). Although the questions presented in the script involve the metahistorical concepts of evidence, change in history and significance, this article will only analyze the concept of evidence. The analysis of the participants’ emerging ideas about the concept of evidence, in both applications of the script (in school and non-school contexts), allowed us to verify that common sense ideas were predominant, as well as ideas related to inference from superficial details. The digital applications used, in particular QR codes, allowed an interaction between the information conveyed from the sources consulted and the medieval historical heritage of Braga observed.