Art FACES – a new educational game for children
A couple of months ago Europeana organized the Europeana Labs Challenge Fabruary 2016 to try to increase innovative re-use of the digital cultural heritage material available on our website.
Today we’d like to present to you one of the winners of this challenge – the Italian start-up agency Art Stories and their winning product: Art FACES, a fun, educational game allowing kids to learn about art. When playing Art FACES children discover five paintings from Europeana Collections. Each painting sets them a simple challenge, and introduces children to a different aspect of visual learning.
They will:
– learn to observe details and explore design in general with Kaiser Rudolf II as Vertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
– learn to read shape and volume with Alice by Modigliani
– understand how a shape can be reinterpreted with Man with clarinet by Pablo Picasso
– learn to pay attention to colours and composition with Self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh
– understand there is a meaning in each compositional element and a story behind the painting with The girl with the pearl earring by Vermeer
At the end of the 5 games the children get their Diploma as Art Explorer and the are then encouraged to visit museums in the real world.
We asked 8-year old Julia her thoughts about the game and this is what she said: “That was fun, let’s play it again.”
While five artworks is a perfect amount for young art explorers, the app creators had to make a selection from over 50 million cultural objects on Europeana.
‘Europeana was a source of inspiration because of its depth: the variety of materials and contents you share is huge. We are ready for an extension of this app, to use more of the artworks and topics and links we found in Europeana’s website!’
The Art FACES app is free and available for both iPhone and Android. And if you feel like discovering more art through fun and playful activities, check out our other products using Europeana’s content:
CREATE – a webapp letting you to create new versions of #Europeana280 artworks with your own photos
Europeana Colouring book – get your crayons ready for colouring unique images from Europeana Collections
