Organised hiking and trekking tours are promoted by many providers in adventure travel. Such guided tours shall be engaging for the tourists and evoke positive attitudes towards enjoying nature. We present the Trekking Engagement Profile as a tool to evaluate engagement factors of such guided tours, based on engagement research performed in a different domain, namely evaluating engagement in museums and science centres. This tool shall strengthen guides’ soft skills and enable them to increase engagement during an ongoing arrangement. For instance, the Trekking Engagement Profile can be applied when tourists indicate that the quality of a guided tour is not entirely to their liking. We show the viability of using the Trekking Engagement Profile in a small study with guides and participants of trekking tours offered by the Norwegian Trekking Association. Further, we offer guidance and charts to promote its practical use.

We report on an exploratory study conducted at a graduate school in Sweden with a humanoid robot, Baxter. First, we describe a list of potentially useful capabilities for a robot teaching assistant derived from brainstorming and interviews with faculty members, teachers, and students. These selected capabilities consist of reading, greeting, alerting, remote operation, clarification, and motion. Second, we present feedback on how the robot's capabilities, demonstrated in part with the Wizard of Oz approach, were perceived, and iteratively adapted over the course of several lectures, using the \EP tool. Third, we discuss observations and findings regarding the capabilities and the development process. Our findings suggest that using a social robot as a teaching assistant is promising using the chosen capabilities. We find that personalizing the capabilities and the role of embodiment are important topics to be considered in future work.

We transformed the existing learning program Language Shower, which is used in some Norwegian day-care centers in the Grorud district of Oslo municipality, into a digital solution using an app for smartphone or tablet with the option for further enhancement of presentation by a NAO robot. The solution was tested in several iterations and multiple day-care centers over several weeks. Measurements of the children’s progress across learning sessions indicate a positive impact of the program using a robot as compared to the program without robot. In-situ observations and interviews with day care center staff confirmed the solution’s many advantages, but also revealed some important areas for improvement. In particular, the speech recognition needs to be more flexible and robust, and special measures have to be in place to handle children speaking simultaneously.

The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology have developed a learning concept for school classes in science centres named ‘learning trails’. In this concept, groups of students perform a series of thematically related experiments with installations in the science centre. The learning trails are designed to support the generic learning outcomes for science centre visits. We argue for using the previously developed Engagement Profile in an indicator to determine both media forms and generic learning outcomes for such learning concepts. Further, we implemented the learning trails in two modes: one mode used paper-based content to guide the students, while the other mode supported the use of tablet PCs where engaging content is triggered when the students approach the location of an experiment in the learning trail. We studied the engagement factors of the learning trails and observed how school classes use these. In a study with 113 students from lower secondary school, they answered short questionnaires that were integrated into the implementation of the learning trails. While the concept of the learning trails was evaluated positively, we could not find significant differences in how engaging the two implemented modes were.

Museums and Science Centres are informal education environments that intend to engage the visitors with their exhibits. We present an efficient design process that allows an improved working relationship between museum practitioners, exhibition designers, and visitors. We present the principles and a graphical representation based on the Engagement Profile from previous work. Elements of the design process are evaluated using a learning game at the science centre Engineerium. The evaluation is based on a study with over five hundred visitors to the science centre.