Engaging Families Through Gamification

We would like to create a discussion around improving location visit engagement with families, in particular children, through the use of gamification. There's a lot of research that shows the educational value of playing games in order to learn, which we would like to present briefly. Then we will show the solution we're creating at Eksplor and the progress we've made on the initial games we've created. Finally, we anticipate a discussion between attendees on the opportunity games could present at their location and a fun brainstorm to create your own puzzle or trivia challenge.

Because of this session, participants will:

• Broaden their thinking about how to engage families, especially children, through gamification
• Learn about a new potential solution to engage families and utilize digital interactions
• Challenge their thinking and others on the use of apps in the visit experience

We are a new startup company in the digital gaming space and have been building our solution for over a year. In preparation for our solution, our company has performed a lot of research and collected some interesting details about the connection between gaming and education. We have begun creating games with initial partner museums and testing our solution with these locations. We anticipate having some great research information to present from these tests, but in full transparency, we have not completed this yet and will likely not have this information until February.

The presenter, Phil Shelhammer, has spent the past 20 years working in corporate America, building a career as an executive at a couple Fortune 100 retail companies. He has stepped aside to pursue this business, as he believes in the potential and the need for families and cultural destinations to solve the issue of engagement.