In recent years, the use of VR games in cultural heritage has been growing. VR Games have increasingly found their way into museums and exhibitions, highlighting the increasing cultural value associated with games and the institutionalization of game culture. In particular, serious VR games have a variety of benefits for educational purposes. There are several studies that deployed VR games to improve visitor experiences in several contexts. However, there are not sufficient studies in the field that examine the benefits and drawbacks of VR gaming. This lack of classification studies is regarded as an obstacle to developing more effective games and proposing guidance on the best way of using them in cultural heritage. This review aims to analyze how VR games are used in cultural heritage settings, to explore the evolution and opportunities of this emerging field, the challenges and tensions these innovations present, and to collectively advance this work to benefit visitor experiences.

When personalities clash, teams operate less effectively. Personality differences affect face-to-face collaboration and may lower trust in virtual teams. For relatively short-lived assignments, like those of online crowdsourcing, personality matching could provide a simple, scalable strategy for effective team formation. However, it is not clear how (or if) personality differences affect teamwork in this novel context where the workforce is more transient and diverse. This study examines how personality compatibility in crowd teams affects performance and individual perceptions. Using the DISC personality test, we composed 14 five-person teams (N=70) with either a harmonious coverage of personalities (balanced) or a surplus of leader-type personalities (imbalanced). Results show that balancing for personality leads to significantly better performance on a collaborative task. Balanced teams exhibited less conflict and their members reported higher levels of satisfaction and acceptance. This work demonstrates a simple personality matching strategy for forming more effective teams in crowdsourcing contexts.

The time restrictions that apply in museum learning increase the need for adaptive and/or adaptable technologies. However, deriving a visitor's profile is not an easy task, since most common ways (asking direct questions, recording user actions) are either intrusive or time consuming. Observing the visitors' movement (visiting style) within the museum could provide valuable information regarding adaptivity. In the present study, issues of visiting style were explored and statistical significance was found once different factors were analyzed. Most importantly, there seems to be a connection between the way people move in a museum and the way they prefer to approach and process information cognitively. Environmental factors that can affect the expression of visiting style were also identified.

The unique aspects of different places seem to require games of different characteristics. This paper describes the initial steps of an attempt to design games for different places of cultural heritage and consists of three parts. In the first part, the descriptive model to be used as a classification method for games of different characteristics for cultural heritage sites is presented. In the second part, the model is used for the creation of different cultural heritage games. Finally, the third part presents a detailed case study of one of the developed games, showing the implementation and user testing processes as well as its efficiency in terms of education and visit motivation.

Is there any relationship between students’ cognitive style and the ability to learn programming through serious games? The aim of this work is to assess the learning effectiveness and motivational appeal of digital games for learning basic programming concepts, involving secondary education students. For this purpose, the Code.org ^® ’s activity named K-8 Intro to Computer Science was used. The study investigated students’ attitudes from gaming activities to reveal the quality of their learning experience. Next, students’ attitudes from games were correlated with their cognitive profile to reveal potential differences. Finally, students’ performance from the digital games was assessed to reveal game-based learning (GBL) effectiveness compared to their cognitive styles. In the study, 77 students of two Greek high schools participated in the context of the European Code Week. The results suggest that these specific games, or similar educational computer games, can be exploited as effective and motivational learning environments within schools, as they provide a high-quality learning experience. Cognitive style was found to be a significant learning characteristic that should be taken into consideration when using digital games to learn programming.