BUas winner of the Europeana Low-Code Hackathon 2022

Under the supervision of the research team, Jessika Weber, Frederike van Ouwerkerk, and Puspita Permatasari of the Professorship of Digital Transformation in Cultural Tourism (DTCT) at the Academy for Tourism together with Bram Heijligers, lecturer in the Data Science & AI bachelor’s degree at Academy for Games and Media (AGM), international tourism student Jos Kamp and Elizabeth Engering, second-year student of Data Science and AI, took on the challenge.

As an application or industry context was needed for the project, the Foundation of Saint Martin Utrecht, partner in the Council of European Cultural Route Saint Martin joined the project. The students created a concept of a location-based game to attract a young target audience into an immersive playful experience. More importantly, with the digital means, long-shared European values conveyed by Saint Martin, such as sharing, mercy and equality are communicated.

The project uses the concept of crowdsourcing, as users can co-create and add new information about the visited cultural heritage site such as videos or pictures, and so actively curate and moderate the game content.

The jury was impressed by the concept. After a tight evaluation process, our students won first prize, which includes a journey to the Social Hackathon in Umbria, Italy, in early July 2023.

If you want to know more about the students’ experience of integrating the API into a game concept, please read the interview on the Europeana website The project will hopefully be continued with a virtual international project in which e-Tourism minor students work together with Data Science Students of AGM and Game Design students of the University of Caledonia in Edinburgh, Scotland in the next academic year. The aim is to improve the first prototyping concept and develop a second stage of the game, which allows user testing, a scaling up to other locations and a feasibility study.