a Mobile Game for teaching and learning History
Jo Dugstad Wake, University of Bergen, Norway
Rune Baggetun, University of Bergen, Norway
aBstraCt
Developments in mobile phone technology, together with an increased research interest in utilizing computer games to facilitate teaching and learning, are an important catalyst for the emergence of the area of mobile, location-based computer games in schools. This article describes both the design process and an evaluation of Premierløytnant Bielke, a mobile, location-based game for teaching and learning history using mobile phones. We argue that by using the surroundings and milieu that are local to the students in a playful context, we can support the construction of meaning related to the subject of history in a way that is both engaging and worthwhile.Som de flesta har noterat så har mobiltelefoner blivit en intergrerad del av människors liv, detta gäller I hög grad även studenter över hela världen. I undersökningen så har de utvecklat en platsbaserad utbildnings-spel för att undersöka hur närområden för studenterna kan ge mening åt ett ämne som studeras. Artikeln beskriver ett sådant utbildnings-spel som heter “Premierløytnant Bielke”. Spelet som utspelas I Bergen, Norge med animerade geografiska omgivningar som byggnader ger de spelaande insikt I historiska perioder av tiden som utspelats där. Jag tycker detta är ett bevis på innovativ utbildning som känns modern och som använder sig av den teknik som finns tillgänglig.
Dagens elever är ju väl betrodd med modern teknik...
Prensky (2001) has described the young generation as digital natives, where the computer is considered a naturally embedded part of youth culture.(sidan 13)
Spelindustrin är ju även väldigt stark och en faktor I den kulturella utvecklingen för dagens barn och ungdomar så varför inte involvera detta I utbildningssyften?
The first references to the notion that the gaming industry has surpassed the movie industry in annual turnover, for example, are now many years old (Schirra, 2001). The gaming industry and computer games are becoming an increasingly significant cultural phenomenon or an “enculturation force” (Halverson, Shaffer, Squire, & Steinkuehler, 2006, p. 1049).
Computer games have also been entering the educational sector on several levels for quite a while.
(sidan 13)
Spel för mobiler är dock ganska nytt och det är inte förränn nu när Smartphone-tekniken tagit fart på allvar som de har utvcklats mer spel för dem.
The first game developed for the mobile phone, Snake, was supplied with the Nokia 6110 model in 1997. Other games that exceed Snake in functionality, exploiting the possibilities of mobile devices further, have been growing in numbers in recent years. (sidan 13)
Spel i utbildningssyfte är i mina ögon ganska outvecklat än så länge och av alla de exempel som författarna i studien nämner så känner jag faktsikt inte till någon av dem. Detta kan ju såklart bero på att de inte är utvecklade av svenskar för svenska skolor men rimligtvis så borde någon i Sverige ha utvecklat liknande spel och spridit dem, men icke...
Charles River City, a game about environmental science and epidemiology, and Mad City Murder, which uses the principles from Environmental Detectives to create a mystery investigation (Klopfer et. al, 2005). Another example of an educational game that is based on location-awareness and collaboration is CatchBob, which is aimed at students in higher education (Nova, Girardin, & Dillenbourg, 2005).
Another example is the natural science game of Savannah (Facer, Joiner, Stanton, Reid, Hull, & Kirk, 2004), in which children take part in a safari with the twist that participants take the role of the animals (lions) themselves.
An example of a mobile educational game that has some similarities with PB “ Premierløytnant Bielke “ is Frequency 1550 (Admiraal, Raessens, & van Zeijts, 2007), a mobile history game where students learn about medieval Amsterdam. PB is similar to Frequency 1550 in that it is a competitive location-based game with a quest-like nature, but the games are also different in some ways.
(sidan 14)
Det som är spännande med spelet är dess idée och utforming. Den ger nya infallsvinklar för hur man kan bedriva studier med hjälp av mobiler.
From our perspective, we have tried to create an outdoor, ad-hoc museum, within the context of a game. The museum appears within the boundaries created by the textual information presented on the mobile phones, the physical surroundings of building structures and their placement, and the students’ engagement with these, in a social context. (sidan 15)
Att de även har tävlande mellan lag som motivationsfaktor gillar jag skarpt. Jag är av den tron att all sorts tävlande i “rätt mening” eller sammanhang, alltså inte utslagande är bra och gagnar inlärandet genom att spetsa till intresset.
One of the main reasons for designing the game activity as a competition between teams is that we hope that it will have a motivational effect on the learners. In their meta-study, Qin, Johnson, and Johnson (1995) conclude that learners competing in teams outperform competing individuals when solving problems, both linguistic and non-linguistic, with well or ill-defined problems. (sidan 15)
Även genom att använda sig av lag så inbjuder man till samarbete och diskussion inom laget så att man lär av varandra under spelets gång. De ville även öka graden av I fantasin sätta sig in I upplevelsen där den faktiskt ägt rum för eleverna genom utforminingen av konceptet. Många bra ingredienser för inlärning i mina ögon.
Det här konceptet är helt enkelt ett lysande exempel på hur man kan skapa förståelse och mening för kulturarvet så att dagens ungdomar förstår vikten av att bevara det.
För att lättare få förståelse för hur spelet fungerade visar jag här en beskrivning av en del av det:
Game Play
When starting the game, the player is presented with a text message that pops up on top of the map, and identifies him or her as Premier Lieutenant Bielke, and described the task at hand, which is to build gunboats in the abovementioned historical context. The player is then asked to obtain construction drawings for the boats, and provided with clues for where they can be found.
The next task is raising funds for the boats, which is operationalized by having them seek out the summer residence of a particularly wealthy, named family in the 1800s, which is a well-known viewpoint in Bergen today. The players have the option of using up to three hints for each task, at the cost of score points.
Figure 3 illustrates the interaction process when picking up a spot (location). In the leftmost picture, the distance meter in the top right corner tells the user that they are 138.5 meters away from the next location, (displayed in red numbers.)
In the second picture from the left, the user has reduced the distance to 31 meters, upon which the numbers turn green. The icons bar on the left of the screen is empty. In the middle picture, the user chooses “Pick up spot” from the menu, and is given the first game mission, to find the construction drawings for the boats. This must be done by finding the commandant of the fortress of Bergen (“Bergenhus”), as the text in the second screen from the right describes. When the user has read the text, and closes the text-overlay, the mode is returned to map view.
The distance meter indicates that the game is paused, and the icon for the first location is displayed in the icons bar. The icon is a picture of a man with a uniform that looked like the one Premier Lieutenant Bielke wore. The game is automatically paused so as not to stress the players when reading text, and has to be restarted by the player. The latter functionality has been added since the completion of the user test described here. (sidan 19-20)
När de summerar sin undersökning tycker jag att de lyfter en viktig aspekt som både kan arbeta för och emot syftet och som visar på hur komplext det är att skapa sådan här form av utbildning/undervisning. Nämligen att tävlingsmomentet kan vara något som både motiverar men också trasar sönder inlärningens form.
Our design and evaluation process has not provided any clear answers about how to go about building and employing location-aware mobile learning games from a to z. There are several issues, however, that have emerged, and all these we see as a set of dilemmas, or contradictions, that represent future design challenges for us. One dilemma is the contradiction between constructing a situation that allows for reflection and the competition to win the game. The example of the group who divided roles, and assigned a runner to save time can perhaps serve as an illustration of this. (sidan 25)
Conclusion
This article has described our efforts with the design of the location-based mobile computer game PB, with emphasis on technological infrastructure, historical background and game play, and placed our work in relation to our inspiration in other academic work. It has described our evaluation of the game in a setting of actual use, and provided a discussion of what we see as the most important findings. We will conclude with some challenges we will face, and what we regard as central contradictions in our research. (sidan 26)
The first one is the challenge of mixing games and learning.
Något som verkligen saknas I den svenska skolan...
We can also relate this to the distinction between joy and work, where we, when designing games for educational purposes, need to take into account that we are dealing with what Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti call “ludic pursuits” (1999).
Att ha roligt samtidigt som man lär sig något kan aldrig vara fel....
There will also be a whole range of usability factors that need to be analyzed. Mobile collaborative game playing concerns a fairly new interaction paradigm where advanced small displays should be an important part in augmenting reality, as well as drive the mixed real-virtual game play forward. Switching attention between the real and the virtual, and ensuring a flow in the game will be a major concern for further technical interaction design.
Att det ligger en stor utmaning I och med detta nya koncept med en annan sorts “paradigm” är helt klart...
Finally we see a set of new practical methodological challenges. Moving into the streets and fields will demand methods other than the traditional methods associated with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design.
Spel i utbildningssyfte är i mina ögon ganska outvecklat än så länge och av alla de exempel som författarna i studien nämner så känner jag faktsikt inte till någon av dem. Detta kan ju såklart bero på att de inte är utvecklade av svenskar för svenska skolor men rimligtvis så borde någon i Sverige ha utvecklat liknande spel och spridit dem, men icke...
There are several examples of mobile games that are explicitly directed at education. One is Environmental Detectives (Klopfer et al., 2002). This game operates on a location-aware hand held computer, and puts the student in charge as an environmental detective responsible for investigating a toxic leak at a real geographical location.
Charles River City, a game about environmental science and epidemiology, and Mad City Murder, which uses the principles from Environmental Detectives to create a mystery investigation (Klopfer et. al, 2005). Another example of an educational game that is based on location-awareness and collaboration is CatchBob, which is aimed at students in higher education (Nova, Girardin, & Dillenbourg, 2005).
Another example is the natural science game of Savannah (Facer, Joiner, Stanton, Reid, Hull, & Kirk, 2004), in which children take part in a safari with the twist that participants take the role of the animals (lions) themselves.
An example of a mobile educational game that has some similarities with PB “ Premierløytnant Bielke “ is Frequency 1550 (Admiraal, Raessens, & van Zeijts, 2007), a mobile history game where students learn about medieval Amsterdam. PB is similar to Frequency 1550 in that it is a competitive location-based game with a quest-like nature, but the games are also different in some ways.
(sidan 14)
Det som är spännande med spelet är dess idée och utforming. Den ger nya infallsvinklar för hur man kan bedriva studier med hjälp av mobiler.
From our perspective, we have tried to create an outdoor, ad-hoc museum, within the context of a game. The museum appears within the boundaries created by the textual information presented on the mobile phones, the physical surroundings of building structures and their placement, and the students’ engagement with these, in a social context. (sidan 15)
Att de även har tävlande mellan lag som motivationsfaktor gillar jag skarpt. Jag är av den tron att all sorts tävlande i “rätt mening” eller sammanhang, alltså inte utslagande är bra och gagnar inlärandet genom att spetsa till intresset.
One of the main reasons for designing the game activity as a competition between teams is that we hope that it will have a motivational effect on the learners. In their meta-study, Qin, Johnson, and Johnson (1995) conclude that learners competing in teams outperform competing individuals when solving problems, both linguistic and non-linguistic, with well or ill-defined problems. (sidan 15)
Även genom att använda sig av lag så inbjuder man till samarbete och diskussion inom laget så att man lär av varandra under spelets gång. De ville även öka graden av I fantasin sätta sig in I upplevelsen där den faktiskt ägt rum för eleverna genom utforminingen av konceptet. Många bra ingredienser för inlärning i mina ögon.
By creating a game to be played in teams, we intend for discussions between team members to take place about the possible courses of action, which in turn can create engagement in the learners. Possible learning outcomes of this can be both social and more factual. We envisage that the competitive setting will help create engagement in the learner, without wanting to imply that learners are inherently unmotivated. Furthermore, we are getting at the learners’ capabilities for imagination, which in this setting is to picture the historical events represented in the game, in a setting where they actually took place. Finally, we use text to provide both a set of facts and game information, interwoven. (sidan 15)
Det här konceptet är helt enkelt ett lysande exempel på hur man kan skapa förståelse och mening för kulturarvet så att dagens ungdomar förstår vikten av att bevara det.
For our project we have collaborated with the local City Inspector of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historical Buildings (‘Byantikvaren’). Together with them we have the vision that this will be an activity that raises the student’s awareness about local cultural heritage, which may in turn lead them to care more about their local community, and in addition, be more knowledgeable about the importance of preservation work. (sidan 15-16)
För att lättare få förståelse för hur spelet fungerade visar jag här en beskrivning av en del av det:
Game Play
When starting the game, the player is presented with a text message that pops up on top of the map, and identifies him or her as Premier Lieutenant Bielke, and described the task at hand, which is to build gunboats in the abovementioned historical context. The player is then asked to obtain construction drawings for the boats, and provided with clues for where they can be found.
The next task is raising funds for the boats, which is operationalized by having them seek out the summer residence of a particularly wealthy, named family in the 1800s, which is a well-known viewpoint in Bergen today. The players have the option of using up to three hints for each task, at the cost of score points.
Figure 3 illustrates the interaction process when picking up a spot (location). In the leftmost picture, the distance meter in the top right corner tells the user that they are 138.5 meters away from the next location, (displayed in red numbers.)
In the second picture from the left, the user has reduced the distance to 31 meters, upon which the numbers turn green. The icons bar on the left of the screen is empty. In the middle picture, the user chooses “Pick up spot” from the menu, and is given the first game mission, to find the construction drawings for the boats. This must be done by finding the commandant of the fortress of Bergen (“Bergenhus”), as the text in the second screen from the right describes. When the user has read the text, and closes the text-overlay, the mode is returned to map view.
The distance meter indicates that the game is paused, and the icon for the first location is displayed in the icons bar. The icon is a picture of a man with a uniform that looked like the one Premier Lieutenant Bielke wore. The game is automatically paused so as not to stress the players when reading text, and has to be restarted by the player. The latter functionality has been added since the completion of the user test described here. (sidan 19-20)
Som goda spelutvecklare och pedagoger bör så testade de spelet själva innan. Detta är faktiskt det absolut bästa sättet att förbereda sig på eventuella tekniska problem och förekomma dem. Tyvärr så finns ju inte alltid tid till detta som enskild lärare och därför så tycker jag att om man ska utföra något liknande som detta i mindre skala inom Grundskolan så måste man ändå vara ett “lärarteam” som testar och sjösätter det för att det skall kunna komma att fungera.
As part of our research and development efforts we have carried out various tests of the PB game. During development we have ourselves, as the designers, tested both minor usability issues such as graphics and menu organization, but more importantly we have also fully tested the PB game, testing and playing various release versions of the game ourselves, from start to finish. We regard it as important to conduct these tests ourselves, as we see this as a way for us to establish a reflective practice (Schön, 1983), trying to take the role of a user.(sidan 21)
Nu var dom här riktigt proffsiga så att de utförde även en försöksgrupp som de instruerade och sedan analyserade och intervjuade. För att lägga det på den här nivån krävs resurser eller att man är en del av ett större projekt. Men det är helt rätt väg att gå I mina ögon, man kan aldrig vara för nogrann i sina tester och utvärderingar av nya produkter.
As a follow-up to self-testing the game we conducted a field trial with a group of nine participants. The data that forms the major empirical basis for the study reported in this article came from this particular field trial. There were two female and seven male participants and we organized the participants into teams of three. The test participants were between 25 and 35 years old. Each group was given a GPS enabled mobile phone with the PB game set up and configured. Before the game was started we instructed the participants about the functionality and required interactions with the phone, game play/story, and the rules of the game. Each group then completed the route for the game, and was assembled after completion of the game for an informal group interview session. (sidan 22)
As part of our research and development efforts we have carried out various tests of the PB game. During development we have ourselves, as the designers, tested both minor usability issues such as graphics and menu organization, but more importantly we have also fully tested the PB game, testing and playing various release versions of the game ourselves, from start to finish. We regard it as important to conduct these tests ourselves, as we see this as a way for us to establish a reflective practice (Schön, 1983), trying to take the role of a user.(sidan 21)
Nu var dom här riktigt proffsiga så att de utförde även en försöksgrupp som de instruerade och sedan analyserade och intervjuade. För att lägga det på den här nivån krävs resurser eller att man är en del av ett större projekt. Men det är helt rätt väg att gå I mina ögon, man kan aldrig vara för nogrann i sina tester och utvärderingar av nya produkter.
As a follow-up to self-testing the game we conducted a field trial with a group of nine participants. The data that forms the major empirical basis for the study reported in this article came from this particular field trial. There were two female and seven male participants and we organized the participants into teams of three. The test participants were between 25 and 35 years old. Each group was given a GPS enabled mobile phone with the PB game set up and configured. Before the game was started we instructed the participants about the functionality and required interactions with the phone, game play/story, and the rules of the game. Each group then completed the route for the game, and was assembled after completion of the game for an informal group interview session. (sidan 22)
När de summerar sin undersökning tycker jag att de lyfter en viktig aspekt som både kan arbeta för och emot syftet och som visar på hur komplext det är att skapa sådan här form av utbildning/undervisning. Nämligen att tävlingsmomentet kan vara något som både motiverar men också trasar sönder inlärningens form.
Our design and evaluation process has not provided any clear answers about how to go about building and employing location-aware mobile learning games from a to z. There are several issues, however, that have emerged, and all these we see as a set of dilemmas, or contradictions, that represent future design challenges for us. One dilemma is the contradiction between constructing a situation that allows for reflection and the competition to win the game. The example of the group who divided roles, and assigned a runner to save time can perhaps serve as an illustration of this. (sidan 25)
I deras slutsater tycker jag följande känns viktigt att notera:
Conclusion
This article has described our efforts with the design of the location-based mobile computer game PB, with emphasis on technological infrastructure, historical background and game play, and placed our work in relation to our inspiration in other academic work. It has described our evaluation of the game in a setting of actual use, and provided a discussion of what we see as the most important findings. We will conclude with some challenges we will face, and what we regard as central contradictions in our research. (sidan 26)
The first one is the challenge of mixing games and learning.
Något som verkligen saknas I den svenska skolan...
We can also relate this to the distinction between joy and work, where we, when designing games for educational purposes, need to take into account that we are dealing with what Gaver, Dunne, and Pacenti call “ludic pursuits” (1999).
Att ha roligt samtidigt som man lär sig något kan aldrig vara fel....
There will also be a whole range of usability factors that need to be analyzed. Mobile collaborative game playing concerns a fairly new interaction paradigm where advanced small displays should be an important part in augmenting reality, as well as drive the mixed real-virtual game play forward. Switching attention between the real and the virtual, and ensuring a flow in the game will be a major concern for further technical interaction design.
Att det ligger en stor utmaning I och med detta nya koncept med en annan sorts “paradigm” är helt klart...
Finally we see a set of new practical methodological challenges. Moving into the streets and fields will demand methods other than the traditional methods associated with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design.
Mer forskning till detta nya område behövs och till den mer pengar, som alltid....
/Helge Lundgren
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