Facilitating learning through hands-on engagement with virtual museum artefacts

In collaborative museum learning contexts, it is problematic that groups of museum visitors are not able able to touch, handle, and pass museum artefacts around during collaborative discussions. This can be due to the fragility of the artefacts themselves or due to the people discussing them being in different locations. Interacting with virtual representations of artefacts is a solution to the problem, but digital experiences have typically lacked many of the qualities that are so successful in engaging museum learners with physical artefacts. In this paper, we introduce our theory that hands-on, reality-based interaction using a tablet interface offers a much more engaging way for collaborators to explore and discuss virtual artefacts than the more traditional desktop interface-based experience, and that this increase in engagement will potentially lead to learning outcomes for the collaborators.