I work for Dr. Kurt Squire, and with Mark Wagler, Ming-Fong Jan, James Matthews, John Martin, Christy Johnson, Dani Fahser, and many middle school teachers in South East Wisconsin. Together, our task is to develop ARGHs as curricula for middle school classrooms.Augmented reality games are PDA -based simulations that use GPS -based technologies to create a virtual world layered on top of a real-world context. The games are played with a handheld device or PDA connected to a GPS device. Students carry PDA s as they walk around in the real environment. As they do so, the PDA displays items such as photos, video clips, text documents, and statistics. These items, which appear on the PDA, are triggered when players walk near pre-determined GPS positions. For example, a student playing an environmental game may trigger data related to water quality when they walk near a lake or stream. As the game progresses, players gather data using numerous primary and secondary resources. In the end, they use this information to identify various points of view, develop arguments, and present and defend their conclusions.
In particular, my job is to design games/curricula, effect their implementation in classrooms, research their affects on learning in those classrooms, and present results of this research with colleagues and other teachers. I have thus far designed three ARGH's with this team: Riverside: A Milwaukee Game, Saving Lake Wingra, and Hip Hop Tycoon (originally designed by Ben Devane). I have run many classrooms through our games in Milwaukee, helped organize and run teacher workshops in the Summer of 2006, and the Spring and Summer of 2007. I have also given talks about our research at the annual meetings of both the Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies and the American Education Research Association in the Spring of 2007.
As part of my development of Hip Hop Tycoon, I have constructed a website to help explain the game to teachers who are planning on playing the game in their classes. Earlier design documents for our games were word documents. These got to be more than 50 pages long, didn't include all the relevant material, and were not very good at communicating to teachers the content of our games. The website includes all the documentation of the game as well as all the files necessary to play the game including all the documents teachers will need to print out for their students. It is not linearly ordered, and hopefully makes understanding this game a little easier. This must have been an okay idea, as it has become part of our standard operating procedure when creating these games. This is the website for Saving Lake Wingra. We are still working on a site for Riverside.
