Letters from the Past: Sequenced Multimodal Learning for Historical Empathy in Museums

Museums increasingly employ digital playful experiences to engage younger audiences, yet designing for both engagement and deeper historical understanding remains challenging. This paper presents Letters from the Past, a sequenced multimodal museum learning experience designed to foster historical empathy among middle-school students. The experience combined three interconnected phases: (1) digital storytelling through historical letters and contextual information, (2) a mobile scavenger hunt game linking narratives to museum objects, and (3) collaborative creative writing in which students composed responses from historically situated perspectives. We report findings from an exploratory mixed-method field study with 37 students aged 12–15, using questionnaires, interviews, observations, and analysis of collaboratively written letters. The results indicate that the multimodal playful sequence supported high levels of engagement, collaborative meaning-making, and emotionally grounded interpretations of the past. Students reported high levels of engagement and perceived learning, while interviews and observations highlighted enjoyment, collaboration, object discovery, and engagement with historical content. The collaboratively written letters provided qualitative evidence of historical perspective-taking and affective connection: students adopted historically situated voices, incorporated historical and material elements, and produced imaginative yet historically plausible elaborations of the scenarios. These findings document forms of engagement, meaning-making, and historical empathy emerging within the complete experience. The paper discusses how the observed patterns relate to the theoretically motivated progression from narrative encounter through material exploration to collaborative reinterpretation and considers implications for the design of multimodal museum learning experiences.