Evaluation of the educational potentials of interactive technologies applied to Cultural Heritage. The “Keys To Rome” exhibition case study Alfonsina Pagano, Ivana Cerato Institute of Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage National Research Council Rome alfonsina.pagano@itabc.cnr.it; ivana.cerato@itabc.cnr.it Abstract — How young museum visitors learn from cultural experiences and, above all, how can technologies enhance the museum visit to improve memorization and provide high-profile educational moments? This paper, focusing on the “Keys To Rome” exhibition held at the Imperial Fora Mu- seum (Rome), discusses about the educational po- tential of digital technologies applied to Cultural Heritage together with the effectiveness of mixing up museum collections and technological applica- tions. A tailor-made user experience evaluation has been designed for high school students according to the museum visit path. The evaluation programme, its strategy, tools and preliminary results will be illustrated in this work, providing a promising sce- nario in which operate to empower digital cultural products in term of learnability. Index Terms — interactive exhibition, evaluation, user experience, indirect learning, digital storytel- ling I. INTRODUCTION: TECHNOLOGIES, LEARNING AND CULTURAL HERITAGE Our perception of the world is not formed in adult age but in the first phase of our growth, in our childhood, through experiences primarily done within the family and then within the surrounding community. Speaking about teenagers, they not always are able to create the vivid sequence of events in their mind, because they do not have enough experience to compare, refer to and align what they are listening or viewing. They miss the mental cognitive paradigms to understand and then explain what just experienced. In this scenario, the role of digital technologies can be extremely important: they can accompany teenagers in the process of meaning-making, with a pluralism of communication strategies, supporting the memorization and elaboration processes. That is the main goal of this paper: present a complex situation where virtual museums projects are integrated with the permanent collection of an historical building and try to understand how much contents are efficiently delivered - so to trigger an educational moment. Stories are a first mean for assessing and interpreting events, experiences, and concepts of daily life and past events. That is why we consider them as crucial in the learning process, even more if we deal with digital stories. Janet Murray in her book “Hamlet on the Holodeck” (1998) offers a promising view of the evolution of narrative expression in digital media [5], discussing that children’s being rowdy is an “expression of a more active curiosity or eagerness to look around for oneself”. This demand for new and rewarding experiences has been accepted and elaborated decades-after-decades by Virtual Reality. Nowadays, the typical features of narration like sounds, images and gestures are much more empowered by the use of the Digital so that young listeners can easily figure out what the story is about, and start “living” within the images immediately and intensively [4]. It is true in fact that by directly experiencing, we better our memorization and learning. Interactivity plays here a major role. That is even more important if we operate within the Cultural Heritage field: is it easy or not to imagine how would have been Rome under the age of Augustus? How would have looked like the today ruined columns in the past? Digital technologies introduce the possibility to deeply feel immersed, sharing emotions and sensations and being so connected with others. In “Mediated Memories in the Digital Age”, José Van Dijck stated that media “invariably and inherently shape our personal memories, warranting the term mediation”[8]. In this context, teenagers managing digital products can move onto a wider scenario of “life”, highlighting behaviors and preferences, and directly dealing with their instinctiveness and nature (Locke and Rousseau’s ideals) [2]; they can autonomously address their cognitive processes of memorization and elaboration given their personal direct experience of events and objects [7]. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss about the case study of “Keys To Rome” exhibition, organized at the Imperial Fora Museum (Rome) in 2014, and that stands as a big occasion to test our theory about the educational potential of digital technologies applied to the Cultural Heritage field. 1