REENACT: A step forward in immersive learning about Human History by augmented reality, role playing and social networking

Classical pedagogy about Human History has dealt with many historic events as a mere collection of dates, locations and a number of confronted sides with a final result of victory or defeat. In the same line of thinking, many popular battles and wars are not well understood due to non-rigorous treatment in comics, movies and documentaries. In order to fight these drawbacks we propose a novel technology-enhanced pedagogical approach named REENACT which is aimed at engaging groups of people into immersive experiences to improve their learning about historical battles and wars from the points of view of reenactors and historians. To this aim, REENACT relies on handheld devices and an advanced technological facility that comprises social networking features, augmented reality capabilities and repositories of multimedia contents. Our pedagogical approach has been experimentally validated in collaboration with the Foundation of the Hellenic World in Greece and the School of Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Vigo in Spain. The obtained results in terms of Quality of Experience, Quality of Service and Quality of Community reveal the potential value of the approach to provide new edutainment collective experiences which remain unexplored thus far in educational environments. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.