Having witnessed the unexplored potential of co-located group collaboration in contemporary museums, the proposed research aims to identify which elements of collaborative virtual environments and serious games can be leveraged for an enhanced learning experience. Our hypothesis is that synchronous, co-located, group collaboration will afford greater learning compared to the conventional approaches. We developed C-OLiVE, an interactive virtual learning environment supporting tripartite group collaboration, which we are using as a test bed to respond to our research questions. In this paper, we discuss the proposed research which involves building and testing a conceptual framework and also suggesting a list of design guidelines for anyone interested in developing virtual environments for informal learning spaces.