Shine Bright Like Silver: A Mobile Museum Companion for Gamified Learning and 3D Simulation on Traditional Silversmithing

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Shine Bright Like Silver, a mobile application developed for PIOP's Silversmithing Museum in Ioannina, Greece, to document, simulate, and present the sand casting and filigree silversmithing techniques. The proposed solution integrates semantic knowledge graphs, an interactive crafting simulation, and gamified learning elements to externalize and operationalize the implicit procedural knowledge involved in the craft. A user study was conducted with n=26 museum visitors to assess the system's effectiveness in terms of usability, learning outcomes, and early indicators of craft valorization. The findings suggest that combining semantic representation with interactive simulation, embedded within a museum context, offers a scalable and replicable framework for the digital preservation of heritage crafts. The work contributes to the broader discourse on technology-mediated craft education by illustrating how tacit knowledge can be systematically captured and transmitted through mobile digital environments, and by positioning visitor-facing tools within a broader reenactable preservation infrastructure.