The Ocean Game: Assessing Children’s Engagement and Learning in a Museum Setting Using a Treasure-Hunt Game Abstract The use of mobile interactive technology, in museum settings, has the potential of providing young audiences engaging and enjoyable learning activities. As museum visitors are increasingly looking for entertaining experiences inside museums, the dichotomy between learning and entertainment is blurring. In this paper, we present the Ocean Game, a treasure-hunt based mobile game in which 9-10 years old children search and collect a plethora of marine animals and learn about their key characteristics in the context of the Natural History Museum of Funchal (NHMF), Portugal. In this study, our aim was to fuse engagement and entertainment by offering a gaming experience in line with the learning goals of the museum. To evaluate the overall enjoyment and the information that was gained by the children, we compared the performance of players that were engaged with the Ocean Game with the performance of children taking a traditional guided tour. Analysis of the data supports our initial supposition, as children preferred to explore and enjoy the museum space through a gamified approach. Nevertheless, several shortcomings were found in the informal learning aspects of the game. Discussion and future work sections will tackle next steps regarding these issues. Author Keywords Indoor location; proximity sensing; treasure-hunt game; museums; children; learning; engagement. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. CHI PLAY'17 Extended Abstracts, Oct. 15–18, 2017, Amsterdam, Netherlands © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5111-9/17/10…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3131435 Vanessa Cesário Madeira-ITI, University of Porto Portugal vanessa.cesario@m-iti.org Marko Radeta Madeira-ITI Portugal marko.radeta@m-iti.org Sónia Matos Madeira-ITI Portugal sonia.matos@m-iti.org Valentina Nisi Madeira-ITI, University of Madeira Portugal valentina.nisi@m-iti.org