4.26.11 | Students, teachers, museum educators and designers all gathered as part of a giant experiment last week to help figure out how educators can best take advantage of mobile technology for learning.
The ARIS Global Game Jam, held April 18-20, invited participants from around the globe to join a three-day game-making session to try out the new ARIS tool, which enables users to create place-based or narrative gaming activities designed for teaching and learning.
What they came up with may amaze you: A zombie apocalypse, augmented reality soccer and even a mobile re-telling of film noir are just a few of the 127 games created by teams in four different countries.
“We wanted it to be a quick-iteration, kids-play, do-it-fast kind of thing,” said Seann Dikkers, a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student who helped organize the event. “We put it up online two months ago, and 30 different groups, plus hundreds of people, signed up to begin using it.”
ARIS stands for Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling and was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [Read more about ARIS at Spotlight]. The event took advantage of experimentation and rapid prototyping.
Game jam developers used technology to check in and share ideas. Photo by Academic Technology.
“I think the prototypes are going to tell us a lot more about mobile learning than a product is,” said ARIS Project Manager David Gagnon in a video, “And that’s really something you can only do in this environment.”
In addition to the ARIS team with leadership from Chris Blakesley, the jam was organized by graduate students in the Games, Learning and Society research group, faculty at the University of New Mexico, and staff members of the academic technology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One of my favorite prototypes created at the jam is “Henry Vilas Virus,” designed by Heidi Pankratz and her students from the Oregon Middle School in Oregon, WI. It takes users through the local zoo in a quest to identify a mysterious virus that is plaguing the animals. Also check out “Le Botaniste,” designed by a Spanish development team. Players learn about botany of the Mediterranean using their mobile phones and handheld microscopes. Finally, be on the lookout for “Our Minnesota,” developed by a team from the Minnesota Historical Society, that enables visitors to meet and solve problems faced by real historical characters in state history.
“One of the visions of ARIS,” Jim Matthews, a graduate student who helped organize the event said in a video, “is the idea of creating an open-source platform but also starting to cultivate a community of designers that are going to carry this open-source platform into the future.”
I was struck by the collaborative nature of this event and the game-making process itself. Organizers used “sprints” and “check-ins” to help teams develop and dump ideas quickly. On the third day, each team showed its basic game concept to other jammers through a live video stream of all the locations. You can catch the spirit of the event in the video below, and see more pictures on Flickr here and here.
We’ll continue to report on ARIS in the coming months. The tool has just won an Adaptation Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Engage program. Faculty and students there will be developing mobile games with ARIS for teaching at the university over the next few years.
The full beta version of ARIS will be released at the Games + Learning + Society Conference
in June. Watch the jam’s celebration video below:
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