Designing and Evaluating a Game-Based AR Application for Heritage Learning: Insights from the Choirokoitia Mystery Game

Within the trajectories of design-based research (DBR) and multimodal theory, this study captures the iterative processes undertaken to design, develop, and deploy game-based Augmented Reality (AR) applications for learning, exploration, and collaboration within higher education settings. Three game-based scenarios were designed set in a prehistoric neolithic site, Choirokoitia, in the Mediterranean region. The study investigated the pedagogical and technological affordances, complexities, and contradictions that our interdisciplinary team experienced during these iterative processes. Using a multimodal perspective and drawing on Klopfer and Squire’s (2008) framework, we delineated six phases, from aligning the AR scenario design with European project requirements and creating multimodal contexts, to identifying future research directions. The results demonstrate the intricacies and iterative processes utilised in harnessing multiple software and hardware resources for the conception and realisation of AR embedded within culturally and historically rooted contexts that enact affordances for exploration and collaboration. These endeavours were underpinned by pedagogical imperatives that focus on task-oriented activities.