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When local games are played informally outside of school, just for the fun of it, or in formal K-16 learning environments, players discover new worlds and experiences; learn complex dynamics of places; explore identities; develop fluencies with language, data, ideas, and technology; improve skills in problem solving and collaboration; expand abilities to think spatially and reason with evidence; and transfer these competencies to new places—all while enjoying the games.
Augmented reality (AR) games excel in making learning hands-on, contextualized, and experiential; they can also provide the opportunities for extended reading, writing, and mathematics if the games are contextualized with other media, environments, and instruction. We encourage teachers to create game-based curricula in which AR games are used along with other tools to teach required content. Our research addresses both local games and game-based curricula and instruction.
Middle school students are actively engaged while playing AR games as part of their curriculum. On this students, teachers, and our own observations strongly agree. Students often say it’s fun to use technology to learn outside of the classroom. Students also say they enjoy being outdoors and walking around while they play in real-world settings; the roles, choices, and hands-on experiences of playing games; the thinking and investigating it takes to figure out the game challenge; and improving their cooperation as they play games with friends.
One teacher observed:
The technology–they just went nuts over it. . . . All of a sudden they were excited about finding the cure and finding the causes for this problem. . . . And what was interesting is that they didn’t see it as a school project. They saw it as we are solving a life problem. Like this is the real thing. Like, we’re real people now. They didn’t see it as, ‘now I gotta do this and then do that and then I gotta write a paper and then I have to edit it and then I have to do a science lab.’ No, this was a situation that they had to solve. . . . They were enjoying themselves. They were learning. They felt like they were real researchers, real scientists out there solving a problem. . . . They were still talking about it weeks later.
Another teacher observed that playing the game in small groups, where different roles get different information, motivated active participation even from reticent students:
I would say, ‘water people, sit over there. Doctors, sit over there. What are your observations? What are you thinking about? What inferences are you making?’ They would come up with a list as the doctors, the water people, the ecologists. And then they would go back to the teams that I had put them in where there was only one doctor, one ecologist, one water person. Which was valuable because they knew that they had to learn within the group. They had to be prepared because they were the only doctor spokesperson. There was nobody else to carry the weight. Which really pushed some of my students who don’t like to share or would not be as interested in sharing. When they were the only ones there was no one else to fall back on.
A third teacher described how students were motivated by including classroom simulation in a game-based curriculum:
We have been getting into character, and some of my students are convinced that this is a real case we are trying to solve! Our school had enough lab coats so that each student in all three classes has their own lab coat to wear when we work on the project. I made them nametags with their title and the company's name on them that they put on their lab coats. On the first day, I had one of our security guards come in the room with a ‘package’ from EnvironSci, marked as if it had come through the mail with the word ‘urgent’ on the sides. He came in during our silent reading time, so of course they were all very surprised and excited to see what it was. Their lab coats, nametags, confidential files, and a letter from EnvironSci were inside. It was a fun way to introduce the project and really got them interested right off the bat!
Indeed, what students and teachers say about learning with AR games echoes research on motivation (e.g. Brewster and Fager, 2000).
Motivated students spend more time on task, learning what they attend to. But what are AR game players paying attention to, and how does that impact learning? Here’s what students currently encounter in curricula based on AR games. Teachers use these components as a framework and adapt our course materials to design game-based curricula that align to local standards in the various academic disciplines.
The real world is the game board for AR games. Walking around in nearby ecological habitats or neighborhoods, students use all of their senses, so that learning is physically situated. Everything that happens in the classroom before going out to play a game is designed to prepare students to experience a place fully. Returning to their classrooms, they frequently refer back to this place.
At specific locations during game play, triggered by GPS devices, players find additional information on their handheld computers. Virtual interviews, images, and other documents augment sensory experience to create a larger understanding of the place. Students may learn about a site’s history, look at data collected by scientists, and encounter virtual people (NPCs, or Non-Playing Characters) with different experiences and agendas related to the site.
. At the surface level, while playing an AR game students hear and evaluate the stories NPCs tell. As the game unfolds, players attempt to piece together fragments of the bigger story about the place. In the final presentations in the classroom, students individually and in teams tell interpretive stories of what happened or what should happen. Thus narrative elements (e.g. setting, problem, characters) structure student experience.
. The frame for an AR game and its surrounding curriculum is a dramatic story of inquiry—a problem has come up, and the players are asked to solve it. For ten or more class sessions, students act out this frame story with such verisimilitude that students at times believe the frame story is true. Combining game play on a fieldtrip and in-class learning events into a single extended simulation boosts the impact of an AR game.
facilitate game play and classroom simulation, helping students think and act like scientists, ethnographers, journalists, and other professional roles. In multi-role AR games, players’ inquiries are framed by the roles they play, since each role gets only part of the information. One student reported, “It kind a makes you think differently based upon the information you get. If someone else was getting different information, they could think something totally different.”
is designed into both game and classroom simulations. Like sharing pieces to a puzzle, only by sharing information can AR players satisfactorily complete their inquiries. Learning is socially situated as teams of players weigh evidence together and argue different interpretations. A bit of competition enters in as well as teams attempt to keep up with others in game play and hope to present superior game solutions.
A good challenge provides an emotional hook for intellectual inquiry. The challenge is repeated over and over throughout a ten-day or longer game unit. In local games, the challenge has a real-life quality, because it presents a problem about a specific place. A teacher recalls, “I think that they felt like they were valued, they were important. It wasn’t just a school task. It was a real-life situation that needed to be taken care of.”
Everything observed while walking through a game space, everything that appears on the handheld computers, and all the additional texts, images, and statistics handed out in the classroom are potential evidence that might help solve the game challenge. As in real life, some of the evidence is contradictory, requiring players to evaluate the point-of-view, validity, and relevance of all data. The additional evidence handed out in class will obviously be tailored to the standards of the academic discipline being taught—in one classroom, students may focus on strategies for reading texts, while in another they primarily practice graphing statistics.
Learning comes to a peak when students struggle to use the best evidence to build the best theories about what happened or what should happen in the place they are investigating. They develop hypotheses and defend them to teammates who may want their team to present different hypotheses to the whole class. Arguing about evidence and hypotheses prompts the student to repeatedly reexamine game and classroom texts and experiences. The kinds of thinking to be used in this process will be customized to match the kinds of evidence examined in class and to the academic discipline.
On the final day of an AR game-based unit, most teachers in our project require individual students to hand in a written argumentative essay and the teams to give oral presentations. Here’s how one teacher describes it:
They know it is high stakes. There is built-in motivation there because they’ve known from the very beginning, ‘I need to learn this.’ Because it is not about passing a test. It is about ‘I’m standing in front of my peer group and saying here it is. This is what I think and here is my evidence.’ And they know that they have an audience. Half of them are going to argue with them.
We believe highly engaged students working with AR games will become more fluent in these components. They will build meaningful mental maps of a place, become adept at using handhelds, analyze and tell stories, participate in simulations, immerse themselves in roles, collaborate with teammates, stick to a challenge, weigh evidence, compare hypotheses, and present meaningful game solutions. While teachers enthusiastically report seeing improved performance by their students in these areas, and while we have observed many highly engaged students and excellent task performance, we need further study to more completely understand how much AR game curricula can increase student fluency.
Contested places is a master metaphor for understanding local games--a way of describing what local games are, and a theory for describing how they can be best incorporated into classrooms. All of our AR games are set in a place that faces or has faced challenges, and include diverse voices of NPCs who experience, interpret, or imagine the future of the place differently. Contested place thus suggests primary narrative elements: the events that flow from people who have problems in a place; or in scientific contexts, the story of the give and take of diverse natural elements in a place. Such a place has a history, limits, potential, and endless interactions.
The emotional dramas of contests hook students, as do nearby, hands-on, and context-rich local places. Combined in a local game, a contested place is a natural focus for instruction and learning. It at once provides coherent and rich subject matter, intrinsic motivation, multiple entry points for inquiry, opportunities to develop many fluencies, and structures for developing deep understanding of the world. Meaning sticks to place, making it possible for students to easily comprehend what is otherwise difficult. As students accumulate more information, they layer it on top of initial experiences, still anchored to former locations and images, creating a thick interpretation, like a many-layered virtual interactive map. Students can thus build up a model of a place that exhibits robust dynamics and complex systems.
While students often struggle to connect the abstractions of academic subjects, place is already coherent, with multiple connections waiting to be uncovered. When the components of a curriculum are also necessarily linked, teaching and learning both flow more readily. Curriculum and instruction are easier to design when built with places, games, and stories that already have understandable structures. History, for example, becomes visible in local places, as students encounter buildings, other artifacts, elders, stories, skills, traditions, and values that have been “passed to the present.” Every place, likewise, is a workshop for civics, because places are changing into the future, designed by our actions. And natural habitats are laboratories for studying biology, chemistry, geology, and weather science. In the real world, we have plenty of “room” and “rooms” for learning where materials, tools, and expertise are always ready for use by students.
As educators we are familiar with the idea of “mental maps,” spatial designs that frame our thinking. Images of place structure the experiences of the world when they enter our minds. Teaching becomes especially strategic at the intersection where real places become mental places, where we use evidence to check the validity of our ideas. Direct encounters and experience can help students rethink misconceptions, over-generalizations, and stereotypes. Arguments unanchored by information are usually unconvincing. Local games provide sufficient content with which to exercise accurate reasoning.
In contested places, this mental geometry becomes lively, as empty space becomes filled with connected content, revealing the complexity required to support life in habitats and neighborhoods. According to John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” With well-designed local games, students have the structure and content they need to build social networks, elaborate models, and big ideas.
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Local games are tools for enjoyment—and for learning. 