ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCAVENGER HUNT ON MOBILE
DEVICES: FROM E-EDUCATION TO E-BUSINESS
A Triple Adaptive Mobile Application for Supporting
Experts, Tourists and Children
Katharina Holzinger, Manfred Lehner
Institute of Archaeology, Karl-Franzens University Graz, Graz, Austria
Markus Fassold, Andreas Holzinger
Institute of Information Systems and Computer Media, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Keywords: iPhone App, Mobility, Archaeology, Scavenger hunt, Collective intelligence.
Abstract: This paper reports on the design and development of a mobile application to support archaeological
education and to raise awareness for our cultural heritage by making use of the powerful notion of play. The
application reads information from Quick-Response Codes (QR-Codes) on paper sheets, which can be
placed directly at the points of interest. Users can now follow an archaeological scavenger hunt along those
points of interest. They start at one point of interest and get hints on how to find the others. This makes use
of collective intelligence, i.e. using the mobile devices amongst the group of users as social communicators
in order to get specific information on the target; through these additional discussions both the one who
states questions and the one who gets the answer can learn incidentally. Although this App has been
developed for educational purposes, it can be used just for fun, e.g. for a children’s birthday party: Hiding
treasures in various spots in the garden and delivering information on QR-codes showing hints on how to
find the spots. Moreover, the use of the ArchaeoApp in the Tourism modus, is a challenge for e-Business.
1 INTRODUCTION
A fundamental problem in urban archaeology is that
objects found at archaeological excavations have
been removed to a museum or depot and the site is
built over and thus no longer visible: neither to
experts nor to the interested public.
Consequently, it is of professional, educational
and touristic interest to label such points of interests
(POI) and to provide electronic information about
the removed artefacts and their history in the context
directly at the POI.
Due to the widespread and growing availability
of Smart Phones (e.g. iPhone), the goal of this
project was to make such information accessible by
using ubiquitous/mobile devices (for example on
iPhones, see Figure 1) and to address the specific
interests, needs and demands of three different user
groups: experts (students), tourists and children.
Figure 1: A view on the ArcheoApp (left: geo-location;
right: the corresponding archaeological information.
131
Holzinger K., Lehner M., Fassold M. and Holzinger A..
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCAVENGER HUNT ON MOBILE DEVICES: FROM E-EDUCATION TO E-BUSINESS - A Triple Adaptive Mobile Application for
Supporting Experts, Tourists and Children.
DOI: 10.5220/0003527301310136
In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B-2011), pages 131-136
ISBN: 978-989-8425-70-6
Copyright
c
 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

The ArcheoApp can be adapted to three different
levels of expertise (Figure 2):
• Expert modus, for students of Archaeology;
• Tourist modus, for people interested in
Archaeology and
• Children modus, to be used in a context of a
scavenger hunt.
A scavenger hunt is a typical mobile activity that
both adults and children can perform. In a scavenger
hunt, participants are divided into teams and given a
list of items, often unrelated and obscure. The first
team to collect all the listed items within a given
time limit wins the game. The essential elements of
this play (timed task, teamwork, mobility) can be
used for a mobile collaborative problem-solving
approach.
Figure 2: The triple mode of the ArcheoApp (for a better
understanding look also on figures 5 and 6).
Such a scavenger hunt tool confronts users with a
problem, which is usually more easily solved by the
collective intelligence of the whole group (Massimi,
Ganoe & Carroll, 2007). Collective Intelligence is
currently of high interest among researchers, due to
the fact that there are effects regarding the
performance of individuals on a wide variety of
cognitive tasks (Woolley et al., 2010). Recent
research showed that different collaboration models,
strategies, as well as atmospheres can greatly
influence the performances of its members. In
collaboration, each individual can have better
learning effectiveness (Shih et al., 2010).
2 BACKGROUND
Originally, the idea of this project was to use radio
frequency identification technology (RFID) for
tagging archaeological objects and to make use of
separate devices including Tablet-PC’s (Holzinger et
al., 2010c).
This was obviously due to the fact that we have
past experience with the application of RFID based
technologies and mobile devices (Holzinger et al.,
2010a), (Holzinger, Schaupp & Eder-Halbedl,
2008b), (Holzinger et al., 2008a), (Weippl,
Holzinger & Tjoa, 2006), (Holzinger, Schwaberger
& Weitlaner, 2005), .
Based on the archaeological problem description
in section 1 and the lecture of Urban Archaeology
which consists of 13 points of interest (Figure 3), a
concept for a mobile application has been created. A
description of the 13 POIs from an Archaeological
viewpoint can be found in (Holzinger et al., 2011).
Figure 3: The basis for ArcheoApp: 13 points of interest
(indicated by red numbers) along an urban archaeological
tour for students of Archaeology (M. Lehner, Graz).
Our first field tests in summer 2010 with a group
of 8 students of archaeology on the archaeological
route of 13 points of interests revealed that more
than one device is awkward and difficult to handle –
for both the students and the teacher; most of all the
users reported that the tablet size (even the iPad) is
still too large and too heavy for outdoor activities.
Based on these experiences, we decided to use
smaller devices (e.g. iPhones, which are increasingly
available amongst students) and Quick-Response
(QR-Codes) as these have the advantages of being
optical readable, i.e. functioning with any handheld
with a camera.
3 RELATED WORK
Although there is some related work on the use of
tagging POIs with QR-Tags, there is to date no such
work within archaeological education.
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Osawa et al. (2007) developed a support system
for outdoor learning using exploratory observation
and conducted an experiment to use their system in
the observation of nature. Their system used both
RFID tags and QR-Tags to locate positions on a
horticultural farm and its surrounding forests. They
used a handheld computer along with a reader to
detect the tags where the students got a description
and an educational hint. Additionally, they used a
mobile phone with a camera along with QR-Codes.
Their evaluation showed that both RFID and QR-
Tags were regarded as useful for outdoor learning by
the students. The comparison of the two tag systems
showed that the QR-Code was preferred due to the
easy handling with lightweight mobile phones
(Osawa et al., 2007).
A further work was presented by Chang et al.
(2007) and describes a novel way-finding system
aimed at increasing the independence of cognitive-
impaired people (e.g. mental retardation etc.) in their
daily lives. They used geo-coded QR-codes, which
embed the coordinate (x, y, floor) along with a social
computing approach to shorten the learning curve of
the end user. For this purpose, they attached geo-
coded QR-codes, which can be imagined as a new
kind of traffic sign system to selected positions on
routes. The navigational photos are delivered on
demand to the end user who uses the built-in
handheld camera to read-in the QR-code when it is
within range and line of sight. A tracking function is
integrated to timestamp the visited positions and
issue alerts in case of anomalies. They found QR-
codes to be a cheap, easy and a useful alternative
tracking system in comparison to RFID sensor
networks. They were also found to increase the
sense of security and lowers the acceptance level for
the assistive technology (Chang et al., 2007).
A general approach to tagging objects can be
found in (Goh et al., 2007). Moreover there are
examples of cultural mobile guides that put the end
user and their need for mobility in the focus of
attention (e.g. (Augello et al., 2006); (Pilato et al.,
2006)) and there is some previous work which has
been done on augmenting the learning experience in
museums (e.g. (Hall et al., 2006), (Hall & Bannon,
2006). To date, no work on the implementation of an
archaeological scavenger hunt has been reported,
although there are a few museums mentioning their
usefulness for education (see e.g. the American
Museum of Natural History, who also provides a so
called directionApp, http://www.amnh.org/apps).
Massimi et al (2007) point out that mobile
computing enables a group to accomplish, in teams,
efficient fieldwork that would have required several
trips if performed by individuals, or may not have
been accomplished at all.
Field researchers can deduce new information
from findings they make while in the field, and
apply it immediately to the situation at hand. This is
especially important in fields where the time or
resources to conduct several studies isn’t available.
This domain can be termed mobile collaborative
problem-solving (Massimi et al., 2007).
4 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
In the beginning, we carefully considered on which
platform the application should be developed.
Primarily due to the robust hardware, the choice was
on the iPhone - or rather on the iOS platform. There
are several reasons for selecting the iPhone for this
application (Want, 2010). Moreover, there are some
reasons which clearly affect e-Business (Want,
2010). The iPhone has an integrated high resolution
auto focus camera for an easy and precise capture of
the used QR codes.
Furthermore, the built-in GPS and the compass
are also ideal for geo-location and thus suitable for
navigation in the field.
In the current version, the app was implemented
as a tab bar application in Objective-C, based on the
iOS SDK 4.1.
Figure 4 shows the structure of the software,
which is very simple, since we only need the
provided "UIKit framework" and our own few
classes for the application. The reason why we need
so few own classes is simply because the
frameworks can cover most of the required
functions.
Figure 4: Class overview of the ArchaeoApp.
The following figure 5 shows the use case for
tourists/experts; and figure 6 shows the use case for
the scavenger hunt modus.
We fully implemented a running prototype; as
our test device, we used an iPhone 4 with the current
operating system iOS 4.1. The application also runs
well on all models of iPhone 3GS series with the
latest iOS versions.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCAVENGER HUNT ON MOBILE DEVICES: FROM E-EDUCATION TO E-BUSINESS - A
Triple Adaptive Mobile Application for Supporting Experts, Tourists and Children
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Figure 5: Typical Tourist and Expert Use Case of
ArcheoApp.
For the implementation of the software we made
use of existing frameworks and for the
recognition/processing of the QR codes we used the
Open Source Encoder ObjQREncoder (Verkoeyen,
2011).
For the geo-location and map view we used the
already integrated framework "CoreLocation"
(Kuehn & Sieck, 2009), and "MapKit" (Mark &
LaMarche, 2009).
These two frameworks are not only for the
retrieval of up-to-date maps, we are also able to
determine the position of the device on the map, i.e.
the ArchaeoApp can also be used for navigational
purposes – which is also a relevant feature in the
work of archaeologists.
The archaeological information described in
section 1 is displayed in a so-called "Web View".
In this view, you can easily embed web content
in the application. In our case, this is done by using
HTML code, which has the big advantage that the
content can be edited without much programming
knowledge.
Figure 6: The Scavenger Hunt Use Case of
ArcheoApp.
5 E-EDUCATION & E-BUSINESS
Whereas the primary intention of ArcheoApp was e-
Education, it can also bring some other benefits:
On a Business-to-Consumer level (B2C) there is
a mass market in tourist areas on a personal level,
where interested people can download ArchaeoApp
for a small fee.
On a Business-to-Business level (B2B)
ArcheoApp can be interesting for a mass market in
large towns with a historic background (e.g. Rome).
This is also interesting for smaller towns, open-air
museums or archaeological finding places (e.g.
Flavia Solva (formerly in the Roman province of
Noricum, now Styria (Austria), or Carnuntum
(formely in the Roman province of Pannonia (now
Lower Austria (Austria), etc.). It is proven that
customer interactions can create opportunities for
positive experiences that can lead to long-term
relationship building (Rose, Hair & Clark, 2011).
This can be especially relevant for tourism.
Moreover, by using ArchaeoApp as an attractive
customer benefit, the circle is closed by offering the
big advantage of raising awareness for our cultural
heritage – thus combining both aspects: e-education
and e-business.
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6 CONCLUSION AND
FUTURE WORK
Mobile computing, along with new concepts
including Web 2.0 in Archaeology is generally very
promising (Holzinger et al., 2009).
ArcheoApp shows some interesting possibilities
on various levels, including:
1) Enabling a group of archaeological students to
accomplish efficient fieldwork – once performed
individually – in teams even over distance. This
enables us to make use of some promising concepts,
e.g.
a) Mobile collaborative problem-solving
generally has a big potential for learning (Massimi et
al., 2007) and makes use of collective intelligence.
b) The game-based approach can be very
powerful (c.f. with (Ebner & Holzinger, 2007)), in
order to raise awareness for our cultural heritage,
which is of raising importance of our society, even –
or especially – amongst younger children.
2) The archaeological scavenger hunt shown in
this paper is similar to a geocaching experience,
which is of growing popularity (O'Hara, 2008).
To date, no work on the implementation of an
archaeological scavenger hunt has been reported.
However, future work must address issues of
privacy, security and data protection (Holzinger et
al., 2010b) and a large scale study on the effects of
using the concepts presented in this paper must
follow.
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