#111: Boundary Spanning Narratives in a Constructionist Museum Game

Museum learning is highly social (Allen, 2004). To support and enable socioculturally mediated learning, previous studies have demonstrated how designing exhibits for collaboration can yield productive learning outcomes and engagement. However, few studies have explored the learning value of naturalistic collaborative play in museums (in which there are no explicit prompts/scaffolds for collaboration). We present a museum game and both computational and qualitative observations of interaction modes. Visitors showed diverse collaborative and cooperative behaviors, including clarification, seeking help, negotiation, goal-adaptation, and modeling. Our analysis also revealed that boundary spanning narration (or BSN, Tissenbaum et al., 2017) enabled “talk with evidence of learning.” Additionally, we found that social play (in this case, cooperative and competitive play) varied with the types and amount of BSN. Through the mediation of BSN, two-person visitor groups (“dyads”) co-constructed knowledge, coordinated on tasks, and set shared goals for themselves in non-competitive play, while in competitive play, dyads tended to use BSN towards surveillance and dominating play.