How to get a kid jazzed about the oldest stories in the world in an age of distraction? Make a game of it. That’s the idea behind History Hero, a new app for portable Apple devices that asks children to defend history – for video-game-style points — against an alien group known as the Erasers.

Using portable devices, players seek to “save” world culture from an alien breed bent on social obliteration by answering questions or snapping pictures of artifacts.

The app combines newfangled gaming rewards with old-fashioned scavenger hunts in institutions like London’s British Museum to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art....