Games Based Learning MOOC

Mobile and Bootstrapping - Are you using any free apps?
If you haven't watched it already - Chronicle of Mobile Education I. (video)
"It Takes A Guild - A Guild of Educators" Interview with Trish Cloud slideshare
What can you extrapolate from this interview about bootstrapping in your classroom. What type of bootstrapping or innovation are you doing when it comes to games?

I had seen this video previously, and it is well worth the hour spent to see it again, the slide show version helps on key points. Bootstrapping, as an anthropologist that collects sayings and their derivation, "bootstrapping" come from an interesting place. It is said that you can dig a hole so deep around yourself (bad decisions,etc.) that the only way you can pull yourself up is to grab your boot straps (those loops you use to pull your boots on) and lift yourself out. In other words, creativity and ingenuity as well as faith in your ability to do the impossible to get back on solid ground. As a matter of fact that old thick cable between your disk drives and your motherboard was called a "bootstrap." [sorry,my mine is full of all this miscellaneous information, have to get it out while I have the chance]

I know you mean to extrapolate from games or classroom to further exploration, to use past experiences to move you to a higher plane. We see that with children who get an interest in reading in the classroom and then start reading on their own. I think where mobile games can bootstrap to reality is most easily seen in Geo-caching or taking a virtual tour of am museum and then visiting the museum and using the mobile device (with headphones of course) to listen to the app tell you all about what you are seeing.

I really am not using mobile apps in my classroom, not all my students have mobile devices capable of internet full unlimited data plans, and at a commuter college, it is almost impossible to get them together outside of the classroom.

I have examples of bootstrapping, but not with mobile devices, the use of Second Life, participation in a Global Conference and creating a Day of the Dead altar at a local museum, which included opening night, did bootstrap them out of the books and videos to real life application, we did have QR codes for each of their part of the altar that would take you to a small Animoto of their name and what was there, in that way we did bootstrap reality to a mobile device. Here is one of them:

Example of Video that could be accessed at the Museum on a Mobile Device by QR code

My favorite open-source app for building mobile, location-based learning games is ARIS, which stands for Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling. The folks at the University of Wisconsin have been developing this app for a few years and I think it is amazing. It only works on iOS devices right now. And you can't actually create games with the mobile device because the online Editor requires Flash. So, you create online in the Editor and then download the client from the App Store to play it, all for free. In fact, you can download the ARIS client from the App Store and see if there are already any games created in your area. There are pockets of ARIS game designers all over the world. This is a great app to use with middle and high school kids, too. They can design their own games.

I'll post some screenshots as soon as I figure out how to do it :\

ARIS is beautiful and has a great community involved with it. When we were designing "Project Outbreak" last summer, we investigated it and also played around with it a bit. The constraint was at that time was that it was limited to iPhones. In Colorado, we have a number of droid users. (In fact, there is a bit of stereotyping of who has an iPhone v. who has a droid.) We ended up bootstrapping and using tagwhat and driving the story across multiple media platforms. But, I would absolutely encourage anyone who does not have this constraint to go in play with ARIS. I know some teachers spend a little bit of their summer plotting and planning what they might do diffferently for the new academic year, ARIS may be it.

#7594293 kae wrote:

In Colorado, we have a number of droid users. (In fact, there is a bit of stereotyping of who has an iPhone v. who has a droid.)

I have always found this "sub-cultural divide" among PC/Mac users to be interesting basically, the elite and the unwashed (lol) I am part of the unwashed. It was interesting when the iPhone came out how that carried over with At&T being the only iPhone carrier, and T-Mobile was really considered "down line" but as of yesterday T-Mobile carries the iPhone [I am T-Mobile but won't be rushing out to purchase an iPhone] so, will that tarnish the "I have it -- I am cool -- you don't -- you are ......] Apple has worked a lifetime to make them the "got to have product with the image of seriously upscale," will the unwashed be welcomed into the chambers of the Apple inner-sanctum? Or will the stigma, or stigmata of the "t-mobile" insignia be the dividing line?

I have always found these subcultures that relate to the way we see ourselves and other based on basically branding, to be interesting. There was an article the other day that the first thing women notice about a man is what cell phone he has... ... amazing.

#7594019 Deelynn wrote:

My favorite open-source app for building mobile, location-based learning games is ARIS, which stands for Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling. The folks at the University of Wisconsin have been developing this app for a few years and I think it is amazing. It only works on iOS devices right now.

I'll post some screenshots as soon as I figure out how to do it :\

Thanks for posting this. I'm curious about how a site can integrate augmented reality, as I know this is pretty intensive in terms of the skills needed to render 3-D objects. I work with a fellow, John Craig Freeman, who's done some major work along these lines. For example, this "day of the dead" model that he created is pretty elaborate:



I know there's a lot available at Google's 3-D Warehouse that could be easily integrated, but you are limited to what's already been created.

I haven't had time to look at ARIS: how are they using AR objects? Are these being created by middle/high school students?

--Richard