Did you take art history classes? I did, which meant I had to memorize tons of artists and their masterpieces over the course of history. Last week Boston-area app development firm Ballast Lane made this memorization a whole lot more intuitive – even fun.

The company launched an iPad app called Master Pieces: The Curator’s Game. The game is based off from a book by Thomas Hoving (former director of the Metropolitan Museum Art) called Master Pieces, which brought Hoving’s favorite game of guessing works of art and artists based on a particular detail in the work. The book runs for $19.99, and Ballast Lane is offering the app at a $9.99 price point given the licenses surrounding the pieces of art.

The iPad offers a perfect, rich environment to bring the game to living rooms across the globe, making it more interactive, displaying high resolution photos of each piece of art, as well as including the text of essays which bring them to life. The game includes 54 famous works of art and Hoving’s essays about each, which allow you to learn about the work of art, the artist, and its overall history.

The app includes three different games. The first allows you to “study and guess” masterpieces, helping you learn artists names and associate them with particular pieces. The second game asks you to “match three details,” displaying an assortment of twelve thumbnails of small details in various pieces and having you match ones from the same piece. This allows you to learn and hone in on things like an artists brushstrokes, style, and color palette. The final, most difficult game asks you to “guess the artist,” promting you with one detail and asking you to guess the artist.

The app also includes a gallery where you can browse all 54 high definition digital reproductions, and read more about each.

Behind the app, is the Marblehead based dev firm Ballast Lane Applications, founded and run by Larry Ehrhardt who learned to program at Harvard’s extension program. This mobile design and dev shop focuses on building and deploying apps in the education and conservation space. Aside from The Curator’s Game, the company has also released MyUtilityTracker — an app that helps you to track and make better decisions when it comes to your electricity use.

Would you pay $9.99 for Curator’s Game? Do you know of other apps make art appreciation more interactive?