At the University of New Mexico, some students in second-year Spanish classes become detectives. They travel to Los Griegos, an Albuquerque neighbourhood 15 minutes northwest of the campus, on a mission: Clear the names of four families accused of conspiring to murder a local resident. It's a fictional murder mystery, and instead of guns and badges, the students are armed with iPod Touches, provided by the university. When students enter their location into the wireless handheld devices, a clue might turn up: a bloody machete, for example, or a virtual character who may converse with them—in Spanish—about a suspect. But Los Griegos and the language skills needed to navigate the locale are no fiction. By integrating mobile computing and actual surroundings, the educational game, Mentira—Spanish for ‘lie’ and a reference to the claim of conspiracy the students are assigned to debunk—helps take teaching to a new place outside the classroom: augmented reality. Video and computer games are commonly criticized for isolating players from reality, but augmented-reality developers who work in higher education see the technology as a way to accomplish just the opposite. Researchers developed of a software tool called ARIS, or Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling.
ARIS lets designers link text, images, video, or audio to a physical location, making the real world into a map of virtual characters and objects that people can navigate with iPhones, iPads, or iPod Touches. The open-source tool, which is the brainchild of a Madison research group that focuses on games and learning, was built with students and educators in mind. It has not yet been released to the public; developers are aiming for a fall rollout. The researchers and educators in this small, emerging field see clear advantages to using real-world sites as the backdrop for educational games. A major goal of Mentira is to motivate students "to get their heads out of the textbook" by showing them that language has a vibrant local context, Ms. Sykes says. By setting the story in a nearby neighbourhood, researchers took advantage of its historic sites and folklore to integrate learning about its history and culture into the game. Teaching with augmented reality is not all fun and games; however researchers struggled to find an affordable way to make their game a reality. They chose iPod Touches instead of costlier iPhones. As a result, they had to design a game that would work without GPS navigation and persuade the university to sign a contract for a mobile wireless hotspot.
More information:
http://chronicle.com/article/Augmented-Reality-on/65991/
More information:
http://chronicle.com/article/Augmented-Reality-on/65991/