Guided tour to Meteora
Wednesday 13. April 2019On the 13th of April, according to the plan, we had to do a tour to Meteora. But not the usual tour. The idea was to make a tour that would contain the paths the monks used to follow since years and years ago. So after our arrival to Kalampaka early in the morning, we went to the foot of the rocks at Kastraki. We started our adventure of a long walk under the great rocks.We learned the names of some rocks that the locals named according some legends or because of the appearance, so we stopped a lot of times trying to explain the designation.Also we made some stops to account the history of that place, mostly stories from the ottoman occupation and Greeks sacrifices ( for example the story of the priest Efthymios Vlahavas).
During the tour we saw small monasteries built in the rocks and they were very impressive.
After a lot of walking we arrived to Megalo Meteoro the biggest of all monasteries that was saved over the years. We saw a lot of religious relics, icons, stuff from the monks’ life from the past, we admired material from the Byzantine religious wealth and we enjoyed the view of the beautiful landscape from above.
We saw from the outside other great monasteries but we had not time to visit them, unfortunately.
Then we started our return route which lasted less than our going. Our last stop was the remnants of the monastery of Saint Antonios where we learned the legend about the wife of the ottoman officer.
Finally after almost five hours, we all returned tired but satisfied and safe.
Thursday 4-4-2019
We used action bound to create a mobile adventure, an interactive guide for smartphones and tablets.
An interactive, history, multimedia, guided quiz was create by Lena Avdelidou, an ICT teacher of the Greek team. We took full advantage of the huge potential of gamification with the Bound-Creator’s extensive game elements and tools like GPS locations, directions, maps, compass, pictures, videos, quizzes, missions, tournaments, QR codes and much more to create a fun and exciting mobile app-based adventure.
A paper with the QR code and some basic information was given to the students. They downloaded the app to their mobiles and used a QR reader to start the tour. The first mission was to find Tsitsanis museum- Old Ottoman Bath and Old Prison by using the GPS, go there, find some elements, answer questions, and upload photos and videos. Next missions were to find the Central Bridge, the sculpture of Asklepius, the old castle, the oldest church of Trikala, to climb up to the old clock and visit some other historical places of the town. Information about each place was provided by the app and the students were asked to answer questions, find significant spots and take selfies or videos.