| Body | By Christopher Holden
The road to the creation of meaningful game-based learning can be long. The biggest obstacles are not technical though. What seems to not happen enough is to have very early experimentation with the marriage of these new tools and the larger aims of learning. Instead we have too many instances of producing the same instruction in a different medium. And too much energy and money get thrown into production when the basic ideas have not been tested. This activity is designed to serve as a foundation for a more holistic and healthy learning game design process.
This activity forms basic familiarity with ARIS as a tool to create mobile, place-based learning experiences. Based on the concept of "performance before competence" it gets you making activities in place before worrying too much about if they are fun or encode learning you care about. From a very simple creation, you begin the process of iterating on a design, and adding in relevant material. The overall idea is to learn to create experiences in this new medium that are more than replications of instructional delivery in the old media, to do something that specifically leverages the unique affordances involved. It is described as a self-study for a teacher and colleagues, but could easily be done in groups or with students. No technical background is assumed, but one does need access to a desktop internet browser (e.g. Google Chrome on a laptop) and an iOS device (but not necessarily one per person).
- Imagine a three point tour: three places to go that are within easy walking distance of one another, are worth going to, and have some way to be connected to an overarching idea that would not be obvious to ordinary observers.
- Create a title, short description (<50 words), and image to be placed at the location. The trick with the image is not to replicate what the person will see with their eyes anyway. Find something that compliments what's already there in real life or helps a visitor notice something hidden or subtle.
- Use the basic tutorials at manual.arisgames.org or fielddaylab.org/courses to put your three pieces of content into ARIS and thus create a GPS-based tour.
- Use "offsite" mode to make sure that your tour works in software.
- Find a friend to take the tour with (one of you will need an iOS device that will get internet service where the tour locations are).
- Discuss some experiential aspects of taking the tour: How did the information provided by the device and bodily experience compliment each other? Did the big idea come through? What did you talk about while you were walking between waypoints? Was this tour actually place-specific, or could it have taken place anywhere?
- Using the above discussion as a guide, consider how a similar activity might relate to learning activities you organize for students. Don't think so much about how to put textbook content into the images and descriptions but instead about how things like the empty space between tour content could be used pedagogically.
- Think a bit more deeply about one way that a player could do something more involved than "go to a location", also supported by ARIS, that would be a more advanced game mechanic to try to connect to a learning activity (e.g. following directions, identifying bits of the world, making choices in a simulated conversation).
- Consider a way in which place and learning might really reinforce each other. Maybe the place has cultural significance.
- If this creation were a story, what would the moral of that story be? How is it communicated? How is it distinct from and related to your learning goal?
- Remake your three point tour, but this time with your new wrinkles added. It cannot be any longer. Just a bit different.
- After checking for bugs, find two friends to test out your new game. Gather notes similar to before, but this time try to let them interact on their own and observe how they work together.
- Check out others' work and share your own. You can look for stories of others' use of ARIS and other place-based activities, ask questions on the ARIS forums, and describe your ideas and work. There are lots of others out there looking for company in these fields of exploration.
Think of getting involved in these ideas as something that can be done gradually and with equal parts action and reflection. With each spiral, the teacher or team gets a clearer idea of how the tools work, and how they can connect content, place, and pedagogy. Fairly early in the process, one can end up with an artifact that is worth using. And each stage of reflection and use moves the ideas ahead in concrete ways.
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