The Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology
Opportunity Audit
Jennifer Sly is the Education and Technology Specialist for the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota.
She selected ARIS from a list of 10 mobile platforms to develop an interactive game called Play the Past for students to play while visiting the Then, Now, Wow exhibit funded by a $2.5milion Legacy grant. The ARIS platform had to be scaled to hundreds of users in a single moment and be reliably robust at all times.
The museum directors also required the ARIS team to create an API to integrate with enterprise computer system and generate custom reports and visualizations of player performance in the form of “digital backpacks.” Here, game objects collected by the students with their mobile devices would be accessible to the teacher and class back at school to visualize each player’s learning experience. The feature remained in the game for all to freely access, exemplifying the ARIS team’s focus on participatory design-based research.
J. Sly, Personal Communicaton, October 2, 2015
Institutional Partnership Review
Albequerque Museum of Art and History
Gianna May is a history intern, and Masters of Arts student at the University of New Mexico. She created an ARIS game for the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History for the museum who were interested in developing an immersive, interactive historical activity for school-aged children.
In Quest for the Cities of Gold, players become characters following the 1540 following a Spanish conquistador on a journey for riches into New Mexico from Mexico. They move through the story by discovering and unlocking conversations and QR coded artifacts while interacting with museum artifacts.
A prototype of the game was play tested with visiting students and parents on a free Family Day in August 2013.
CB: Could you describe how the week WiFi that your students experienced disrupted the flow of playing Quest for the Cities of Gold?
GM: Players would be logged out of their game and lose their progress and have to start over, proving to be extremely disruptive and problematic throughout the duration of the playtest. Because the wi-fi settings were out of our hands in the space we were in, we could only get people back on the internet and try to get them back to where they were by essentially rushing through the parts of the game they already completed.
CB: How were quests disrupted in the playtest?
GM: Because the flow of the space (e.g. which way players should go) was not apparent and some barriers were not employed to prevent players from scanning codes that they were not ready for yet, they could scan things out of order, which would disrupt the syntax of the game and essentially break it, forcing them to restart.
CB: How would you assess ARIS's capacity to handle offsite locative games?
GM: One of ARIS's biggest downsides is its reliance upon internet in order to play any game on the server. While players with smartphones have a relatively easy time for logging into the system outside of wireless access, anyone who wants to play a game on a wireless (but not satellite-connected device, like a smartphone) device or play a game in a remote location with a poor signal is at a distinct disadvantage. I believe ARIS is really useful for location-based gaming, especially for locations outside, such as around a college campus
(G. May, personal communication, October 11, 2015)