Education and teaching are among the key tasks of any museum. Contemporary, sustainable, target group-friendly and multi-faceted teaching formats form the basis for allowing the museum to engage openly with its visitors and conduct a dialogue with society. Discovering, learning about and partaking in museums - how does that work in the digital age, and can it maybe take place even before or also after the visit to the museum?

The “Media Guide” digital teaching format employed by the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum has a determinedly interactive focus: For example, the “Entdecker-Touren” (Discovery Tours) format introduces fun and research-like activities to encourage visitors to actively engage with the objects and topics presented along the tours.

The object is not merely viewed as an exhibit piece, but is instead experienced as an expressive, enthralling information medium. The creative use of digital technologies intensifies the engagement with the original on a new level. The digital format does not replace the analogue experience here, rather it augments it, creating an additional layer of teaching.

To enable school classes to do preparatory and follow-up activities for their visit, the tours are linked with the “entdecke.bergbau” (discover.mining) digital teaching platform, which contains a specially developed online game alongside more traditional forms of teaching.

There are special Audio Guides available for all four tours of the permanent exhibition. These have a dialogue-based interface and additional levels of detail designed to make the content and focal aspects more tangible.

The digital teaching formats offered by the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum give its visitors an added visitor experience, with novel methods for immersing themselves in the fascinating world of mining. These include the “MuseumStars” teaching app. More formats and applications are continuously developed.

The Media Guide's digital formats were supported with funds from the Aktionsplan für Leibniz-Forschungsmuseen.