Restructuring Activity and Place: Augmented Reality Games on Handhelds1 (original) (raw)
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Restructuring activity and place: augmented reality games on handhelds
Proceedings of the 8th …, 2008
Human activities are constrained by interconnected and overlapping factors of: biological abilities, time, space, and social narratives. I focus on how the interplay between two of these factors, space and narratives, can be mediated with cultural tools of locative technologies such as Augmented Reality games and GPS units. In order to understand how place-based pedagogies affect learning and how locative technologies, like Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Augmented Reality Games on Handhelds (ARGHs), help connect learners to cultures of place I examine experiences with place-based video games in a deep woods camping environment. Drawing together research in sociocultural learning, design, embodiment, environmental education, experiential education, human geography, and video games, this paper demonstrates how ARGHs can restructure a learning activity to (1) better connect learners to place, (2) increase and mediate their physical activity and social interactions, and (3) help enculturate them into a community of practice.
2013
New information technologies make information available just-in-time and on demand and are reshaping how we interact with information. Meanwhile, schools remain in a print-based culture and a growing number of students are disaffiliating from traditional school. Video games are emblematic of this paradigm shift toward a digital culture and may have potential as a medium for instruction. This case study investigates one enactment of a video game-based curriculum and explores the nature of learning within game-based environments. Specifically, it describes how fictional elements situated the learning experience and induced academic practices, the nature of student-created inscriptions influenced emergent understandings, and the game-based curriculum’s game design features pushed students ’ conceptual understandings, and how learning through a technology-enhanced curriculum triggered students ’ identities as independent problem solvers. The implications for librarians in a world where ...
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, 2019
Studies on location-based games ubiquitously report positive learning outcomes for the players. Particularly these games are shown to promote exercise, encourage to social interaction and increase geographical and cartographical knowledge. To find out whether these positive effects are game-specific or characteristic to all location-based games, we conduct a software search for available location-based games on iOS and Android platforms and evaluate if and how exercise, cartographical training and social interaction are supported. Based on our results we were able to identify six sub-genres of location-based games, and the positive effects associated with each genre. The most popular category in terms of number of games was scavenger hunts and the most popular category in terms of active installs on Android and iOS was location-based MMORPG's. Presence of factors associated with immersion and mixed reality were paired with the popularity and positive outcomes of the games. Cartographical practise, social interaction and exercise were supported the most in the location-based MMORPG sub-genre, to which, for example, Pokémon GO belongs to.
Wherever you go, there you are: Place-based Augmented Reality Games for Learning
2007
Games are among the oldest forms of experiential learning. Game-based learning scenarios are a staple in the military; games have been used to represent, communicate and explore the dynamics of complex situations with multiple interacting variables. Today's videogames allow new kinds of interactions, including real-time 3D and physics simulation. Learners can participate in complex systems over distance and time, and express themselves through game tools (Casti, 1997; Squire, 2004).
Conjunctions, 2022
In this study, we test and discuss a Danish communication and entertainment mobile application (app) aimed at children aged 10 to 12 years for use by families and schools. The app, Tidslommen, has been developed by Museum Vestsjaelland, a collaboration among natural history museums in Denmark. Tidslommen features audio and video guides and augmented reality with game elements, which become active when users enter specific geographical spots. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach (media study, studies in children's culture, educational neuroscience, educational anthropology) and using a combination of the walkthrough method and sensory ethnography, we explore the functionalities of the app at four locations. With our field-based user experiences as the point of departure, we analyse and discuss the potential and challenges related to the intersections among bodily and nature-based experiences, mobile technology and participatory practices as part of a didactic setting that aims to encourage children to participate in experiences with nature. Our study suggests that using mobile technology encourages interactions between peers and moving around at a location. The app also allows for an individualised experience characterised by a play-oriented approach to the location.
Locative Life: Geocaching, Mobile Gaming, and Embodiment
This paper analyzes a worldwide GPS treasure hunt game that is played in over 200 countries with game pieces that travel the globe and are tracked online. The game players hide geocache containers in public areas, marking them with GPS coordinates. Players use their mobile devices (from GPS receivers to iPhones) to track down the container, sign the log, and leave tradable and trackable items in the cache. This mobile game offers the perfect example of the blending of material and virtual interfaces, notions of presence and absence, visible and invisible, and utilitarian and playful purposes of everyday objects. Embodied subjectivity in Geocaching is gaining through a correspondence between the user's location gained through GPS coordinates, the finding of a material object hidden in everyday space, and the signing of the logbook in the container. The act of physically signing the logbook as a way to prove embodied "presence" in material space is highly dependent on th...
Exploring place and direction: mobile augmented reality in the Astrid Lindgren landscape
2012
This paper describes the design process and user evaluation of an outdoor educational mobile augmented reality application. The main goal was to enhance and augment the experience of a visit to a culturally significant place, the childhood home of the children's book author Astrid Lindgren. Visiting sites of historical significance is not limited to the cultural experience itself, but can be seen as an opportunity for learning and exploring a place as it is now and as it has been in past times. By investigating the two design dimensions place and time, our application was conceived as a treasure hunt, where users activate content by moving between places and pointing the mobile device in different directions or at different markers. The application was field tested with mixed groups of children and adults. The evaluation indicates that the prototype did encourage both learning and exploring, which also was the design objective.
Location-based games with smartphones – developing a toolbox for educators
Location-based games for educational purposes provide a link between content and its real-life relevance in a physical environment. The potential of mobile, location-based activities for authentic learning is well known, but the technological and organizational barriers for educational staff still exist. There is a need for easy-to-use tools to facilitate the creation of playful location-based mobile learning activities.Within the MILE project (move-interact-learn-eat), a transdisciplinary team consisting of educational experts in the field of outdoor education, in nutrition and consumer education as well computer scientists developed an authoring system for location-based games, the MILE Designer. This authoring system provides several formats of tasks that can easily be adapted and each task is located intuitively using a simple map as interface. Several tasks are combined to an educational geogame for a native smartphone app. This paper describes the relevant theoretical background and the transdisciplinary development process. The MILE Designer was formatively evaluated in a participatory observation and in focus group discussions. The results of this evaluation process are presented and further educational implications are discussed. Keywords: Location-based game, learning game design model.