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So far, we are developing and using the following games:
Many kinds of games can be made about local environments. At the moment we are most engaged with augmented reality (AR) games in which players use digital technologies to enhance their immediate experience of walking around in real-life locations. We are also interested, among other possibilities, in classroom simulations, board games, virtual tours, and desktop video games.
 Mad City Mystery is an augmented reality game for Earth science students and has been played with groups ranging from 4th and 5th grades to adults. The game begins with an opening story: The students, who are role playing as doctors, environmental scientists, and government officials, learn that a friend of theirs, Ivan Illych has fallen in a nearby lake and died. They learn that Ivan was depressed and had been drinking, but they also soon learn that there are a number of toxins in the environment that could have contributed to the death. Players race against the clock (about 90 minutes, for most classes) to provide the police examiner (played by a real person) enough data to open an investigation into the causes of the death. While the cause of the death is ultimately unknown, mercury found in fish, TCE (trichloroethene) found in the factory where Ivan worked, and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) found in ground water and fish are potential causes. Through the course of the game, players talk to virtual characters to learn life histories and access documents describing chemicals, conduct simulated tests for PCBs, TCE, and mercury, and must piece together an argument about the cause of the death.
 South Shore Beach is a place-based curricular unit designed around South Shore Beach, a mixed-recreational park in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee. During the course of the curricular unit, students role-play as water chemists, public health doctors, or wildlife ecologists who have been called upon to investigate a series of illnesses that are linked to the beach. In order to complete their investigation, players must visit South Shore Beach where they play Sick at South Shore Beach, an AR game that runs on a GPS-equipped PDA. During the game, players explore the beach in order to gather virtual water samples, talk with neighbors, make observations, and interview experts. The information that the students gather during their visit, along with the research they conduct in the classroom, provides them with enough evidence to formulate and defend their final hypotheses.
 Dow Day is a game designed to guide students through an historical-inquiry centered on a series of anti-Vietnam War protests that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1960’s. One of the primary design goals is to actively engage students in the inquiry process by immersing them in a simulated historical environment. During the course of the game students role-play as a journalist who has been called upon to investigate the root causes of the protests and explain how and why they turned violent. As the game progresses, players gather and analyze primary and secondary resources, develop historical arguments, and present and defend their conclusions.
 Hip Hop Tycoon
is an augmented reality game where students role-play in teams as specialists in business finance, sales and human resources competing to build and run a successful store. We hope to build off the strong presence of entrepreneurship in hip hop discourse to involve students in meaningful, problem-solving tasks related to reading comprehension and mathematics, where they have to interpret and utilize complex game texts in order to produce meaning that simulates activities in real-world, professional discursive practices. Effective reading and mathematics strategies are embedded activities. Specifically, the game addresses several Wisconsin State standards for Language Arts and Mathematics. In this way, the game’s aim is to place students in contexts where they utilize mathematics and the language of the “new capitalism” in ways that are relevant to pop culture and young people. Game and curricular documents
 The Arboretum Game is a short augmented reality tour game developed for 1st through 5th grade participants of a Heron Network conference in February 2007 at the UW-Madison Arboretum. Created as a quick design exercise, the game leads players through the Arboretum as they explore different sections if it, look for plants and animals, and learn about the ecological attributes of its infrastructure.
 The Greenbush Game is a set of augmented reality games about the urban renewal of a local historical community called the Greenbush. The game has been developed with most of the work and research done by middle school kids in Madison, Wisconsin. In one version of the game, written by a local 6th grader who collected interviews from some of the original residents of the neighborhood, the player takes on the role of a 12-year-old Jewish boy in 1959, running errands who finds out that the adults in the community are upset about the city's plan to bulldoze the heart of their neighborhood. He decides to collect signatures for a petition against it, and in doing so encounters a cast of characters and stories about the neighborhood.
 The Mystery Trip is an extended deep woods augmented reality game developed for Flying Moose Lodge, a wilderness camp in Maine. As the longest, and largest (geographically) of our AR games, it pushes the limits of the hardware and software. Over the course of a four-day camping trip, players hike through an area of over 16 square miles of woods, mountains and caves, including a 4,200 acre Recreation Area called The Wildlands.
As they encounter riddles and solve problems to win the game, they learn about and employ principles of Leave No Trace and become further situated in the culture of the camp. With that experience under their belt, they critique and redesign the game, adding their own perspectives, cultural signifiers, and stories in order to develop the game and keep it fresh for subsequent players.
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