Triseum Variant: Limits and ARTé: Mecenas in a European Study

Triseum is a Texas company that grew out of the LIVE Lab in the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University. It builds learning games for foundational subjects where high school and college students struggle with engagement and course completion. Two of them went into a classroom study run with European Schoolnet, a network of 34 ministries of education: ARTé: Mecenas, an art history strategy game, and Variant: Limits, a 3D calculus adventure.

The study covered the 2017-2018 school year and followed more than 850 students. Twenty teachers in Norway, Poland, Portugal, Italy and Greece used the games in class. Most let students play both at home and at school or in a flipped classroom, and they tried solo play as well as groups. The University of Würzburg evaluated the results with a triangular approach that draws on more than one source of evidence.

The teachers agreed that the games had a positive effect on engagement, motivation to learn and knowledge acquisition. They also reported that the games held attention, raised confidence and social skills, and gave students room to use their imagination. The pilot grew out of Triseum's membership in the Future Classroom Lab, which it joined in May 2017 as the first industry partner whose core business was game-based learning. An executive summary, the full report and two teacher webinars, one per game, were released in mid-2018.

In ARTé: Mecenas the player is a Medici banker in 15th and 16th century Italy. Triseum's page for the game says it teaches how local and international economies shaped art patronage, and it lists more than 130 artworks by over 70 artists. Triseum also frames the game as practice in financial decision making alongside art history.

Variant: Limits covers the content of a first calculus course: finite limits, continuity and infinite limits. Players work through increasingly hard calculus problems in a 3D world. Triseum describes both games as built around targeted learning outcomes.

Triseum's website loads and presents Variant: Limits and ARTé: Mecenas as current products. Its menu also lists two further ARTé titles, ARTé: Lumière and ARTé: Hemut. The address of the Mecenas page has changed, and the older address forwards to the new one. Triseum Variant: Limits is offered to institutions, classes and individuals; the page gives no price.

Individuals can buy ARTé: Mecenas from Triseum's online store, and teachers or administrators can ask for classroom and institutional pricing. The game page also cites a Triseum research result: art history students in the test group gained nearly 25 percent in knowledge between pre-test and post-test after about two hours of play. That figure belongs to Triseum, and the page does not tie it to the European study.

The report itself is harder to find. The Future Classroom Lab directory address where the study could be downloaded now shows a message that the resource can't be loaded.