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The performing arts are currently in a critical situation worldwide. Various reports warn that the lack of audience. If we focus on dance, and especially folk dances, the situation is worse. In various countries and continents, folk dances are slowly disappearing. In Spain, we find evidence of the downward trend in terms of the number of attendees to performances of Spanish dance -an art form that is highly valued throughout the world. In a generation marked by technological advancements, the only way for classic performing arts to reach young audiences - or digital natives – is to speak the same language they use with new technologies. This paper presents a study in collaboration with the Spanish National Dance Company, carried out with 877 students (aged from 9 to 12) from 12 different schools in the community of Madrid, Spain. We designed a two-phase experiment. In the first phase, we separated the students into 3 groups: students who played a videogame called “Dancing a Treasure,” those who received a workshop from professional dancers, and a control group. In the second phase that took place two weeks later, the participants attended to a real show of Spanish dance, and we studied how the previous educational approaches affected to the students increase of interest after the show. The experiment demonstrated that the videogame was, at least, as effective in increment interest about dance in younger generations as a workshop taught by expert dance professionals. Thus, in terms of scalability, the videogame is a better option because it can be applied with the same results to larger groups with no additional cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, most research and academic institutions own and archive a great amount of objects and research related resources that have been produced, used and maintained over long periods of time by different types of domain experts (e.g. lecturers and researchers). Although the potential educational value of these resources is very high, this potential may largely be underused due to severe accessibility and manipulability constraints. The virtualization of these resources, i.e. their representation as reusable digital learning objects that can be integrated in an e-learning environment, would allow the full exploitation of all their educational potential. In this paper we describe the process model that we have followed during the virtualization of the objects and research resources owned by two academic museums at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). In the context of this model we also summarize the main aspects of these experiences in virtualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]