42 TechTrends • January/February 2014 Volume 58, Number 1 Abstract Experiments in the use of augmented reality games formerly required extensive material re - sources and expertise to implement above and beyond what might be possible within the usual educational contexts. Currently, the more com - mon availability of hardware in these contexts and the existence of easy-to-use, general pur - pose augmented reality design software invite much wider participation. Yet, significant ob - stacles to widespread use remain. A possible strategy to enable broader exploration of this space is to organize augmented reality games research and development at the local level, as relatively autonomous and informal action by educational practitioners and learners, rather than solely directed by educational researchers. The Local Games Lab ABQ is a loose confed- eration of faculty and students at the University of New Mexico pursuing the educational uses of augmented reality games. This paper examines how locally organized development might solve problems in a different and more efficient way of scaling educational technology. T he world today is more favorable to the prospect of mainstream educational AR game development and its use than dur- ing the early days of AR game research (Dun- leavy et al, 2009). The recent, free availability of easy-to-use, general purpose AR design soft - ware platforms (e.g., ARIS, 2008), along with the more widespread use of mobile devices within educational contexts, has made it possible to vastly increase the number of people experi - menting with augmented reality development for learning. This inclusion of AR is occurring in programs of research, curricular development, and many semi-formal contexts like museum exhibitions and community guides. Early adopt - ers can now connect to one another across the globe via common design software and support - ive technologies, reaching a further stratum of researchers, educators and laypersons than was possible before. On its own, this is significant progress. However, hardware and software are not the only obstacles to using this set of technologies to produce educational change. It is necessary to rethink our assumptions and traditions regard- ing who gets to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to educational change. I argue that we need to develop participatory models of re- search, implementation and interpretation. One such model is a Local Games Lab— a name for what happens when early adopters develop ex - perience and expertise to recruit and support diverse participation locally. By learning how to grow and sustain AR game development for use within individual communities, we may be able to reach more than enthusiasts and institutions, The Local Games Lab ABQ: Homegrown Augmented Reality By Christopher Holden, University of New Mexico Volume 58, Number 1 TechTrends • January/February 2014 43 and greatly increase the capacity for the success- ful adoption of further mobile-based pedagogi- cal interventions. An example is the work I have been doing with faculty and students at the University of New Mexico. Whether creating games as curriculum, engaging students in the design process, or work- ing somewhere in between, a diverse set of people, across a variety of disciplines and situations, have found it possible to do interesting development work with cutting-edge technology without large funding opportunities or top-down management. This is despite not having local technical expertise or support, or (usually) previous experience in mobile media production and game design. Our efforts are beginning to show that it is possible to kick start and support grassroots innovation in learning through the use of mobile technologies. We have made use of free and easy to use general purpose software like ARIS, tapped into available resources and opportunities for collaboration, and sought to develop an ethos of coordinating autonomous innovation. We call this effort the Local Games Lab ABQ. Our work is not centrally planned, but a loosely organized exploration of the possibilities to create advanced learning opportunities for students stemming from three main influences: • Mobile technology - extrapolating the five key affordances of portability, social interactivity, context sensitivity, connectivity and individu - ality (Klopfer, Squire, & Jenkins, 2002). • Local place - situating content and ideas into a nearby, relevant context, often by arrang - ing to be there physically (Dikkers et al, 2012, Holden et al., in press; Holden & Sykes, 2011; Klopfer & Squire, 2004; Squire et al, 2007); be- coming involved in the community through this research and development (Gruenewald, 2003; Mathews, 2010; Sobel, 2008). • Games - using game histories and methodolo- gies to create engaging interactive experiences that make the most of technology in the name of connecting players to active participation in new contexts (Gee, 2003; Squire, 2006). I believe that mobile, place-based games provides many opportunities for instantiating powerful pedagogical techniques that may have been difficult or impossible for individual in- structors to enact previously. However, this ter- rain is vast and largely unknown. It makes sense to encourage and support widespread experi - mentation and exploration in this area — to see what might be possible when young people, ed- ucators and professional researchers collaborate on their own terms to explore what augmented reality games have to offer. What is the Local Games Lab ABQ? I use the name Local Games Lab ABQ to describe a set of connections among different activities, approaches, arenas, goals and people at the University of New Mexico that grew out of my efforts to continue AR game research at a new university with fewer resources. In 2009, Dr. Julie Sykes and I set out to produce and implement a prototype of the first AR game for language learning ( Mentira) . We were able to do this with a tiny fraction of the resources of the Star Schools Grant I had previously worked on, both because we discovered and were able to freely use ARIS and because that previous experience gave me significant insight into the design of augmented reality games. Simultane- ously, we discovered that we could empower more than just ourselves. With access to free AR design software and by making available the iPod Touches we purchased to run Mentira , the bar for entry into the AR space was lowered fur- ther. I used Mathews’ (2010) design studio con - cept to reorganize some of my teaching using AR games and looked for opportunities to reach out to faculty and students. This Local Games Lab ABQ has become a small, local culture or- ganized around AR games. So far, this culture includes and functions around the following; • Mentira - the AR game-based curricular unit I developed with Sykes, and importantly, the concrete prototype that helped cut through the confusing jargon around AR games for other faculty and students; • Local Games in ABQ (LG in ABQ) - a class I teach where AR game design is the method by which my students investigate our city; • Workshops (and follow-up consulting) - I hold these for other faculty through our Of- fice for the Support of Effective Teaching un - der the rubric of improving teaching at UNM; • A mobile maker-space - an informal and open space for faculty, students and whomever else wants to come by, that I run and where I pro- vide both training and a setting for develop- ing collaborations; • Several interested faculty - now developing innovative curricula in their own classes using mobile technology and augmented reality; • Several interested students - working with mobile game design outside the LG in ABQ class as a part of other classes, independent studies, volunteer work and internships; • A blog advertising some of the games and projects,- discussing mobile technology for learning generally and use of the ARIS plat- form specifically. 44 TechTrends • January/February 2014 Volume 58, Number 1 Mentira - The seed that grew the lab Julie Sykes and I created the game-based curriculum Mentira to explore the combination of augmented reality and language learning as a way to make Spanish curriculum relevant to lo- cal place (i.e. Albuquerque, NM where Spanish is older than English) in a university class, Spanish 202. We have written about its design and imple- mentation elsewhere (Holden & Sykes, 2011), but more importantly here, Mentira serves as the concrete prototype whose existence paved the way for the other activities and projects of the Local Games Lab ABQ. By putting togeth- er a game for a specific instructional purpose, without much money, with no programmers, with only freely available software and media, and handling the logistics of a mobile device and field trip-based lessons, we were able to begin conversations with others at the University with a concrete, authentic example of a game and mobile technology for learning. Our experience creating and implementing Mentira underwrote future experiments with mobile technology and local place at UNM by answering questions in three areas of concern, described below. tion to implement technology in schools for its own sake. Mentira was helpful in dismissing this common quip in that it was clearly not “technol- ogy for its own sake”. We used an augmented re- ality game to contextualize Spanish learning: the game takes place in a location relevant through Spanish and in the game students use Spanish by participating in the narrative instead of learning about the language. These pedagogical goals and methods justify the use of a powerful enabling technology, and they are sufficiently generaliz- able beyond Spanish 202 to inspire others to overcome the limitations of their classrooms’ four walls. Logistics of mobile device- and internet-based instruction . Even when there are few ideologi- cal problems moving forward with mobile tech- nology in a school setting, practical concerns are typically as much, if not more, problem- atic. What devices do we use, how do students get them, what happens when they break and how do they access the internet? With Mentira , we were able to provide all 250 students taking Spanish 202 with enough devices to play Men- tira with only a small amount of funding. And we found truly inexpensive ways to provide in - ternet access for students playing our game. Not only did this show others that it was possible to deploy mobile learning technology at a school where rather few students had the technology in hand, but those same devices purchased for stu- dents to play Mentira became tangible resources that other faculty and students could take ad- vantage of without formalizing a program and seeking funding of their own. Mentira opened the door for conversations with other students and faculty about what might be possible given the usual constraints of expertise and funding. I could essentially say, “You know there are many education- al goals that are difficult to attain using a lecture and a textbook. Here’s some soft- ware you can use to craft your own rich mobile experiences that leverage both the real world and the structure of games to help your students achieve those goals. You don’t need to be a programmer to use it. I know because I’m not and I do. Not only that, but we’re using this with 250 kids this semester. We built it for $10K, and now that we have, you can do it for much less.” It is much easier to start a collective if you first prove to others that you can walk the walk and that their experimentation will benefit from your experience and resources. “App development” without programmers Programming talent seems to be the most limit- ed resource when it comes to developing home- grown technologically-based interventions; if the constraint is not the money, it is finding the programmer. Yet, my colleague Sykes and I, non- programmers, were able to create Mentira with no technical assistance because we used ARIS. We approached others with not only Mentira as a finished example but with ARIS as a tool that could support their efforts without the need for programmers. Compelling use for games and mobile tech- nology for learning . We have all heard, and maybe even from our own consciences, a hesita- Figure 1. UNM students play Mentira in Los Griegos in February 2010. Volume 58, Number 1 TechTrends • January/February 2014 45 Local Games in ABQ (Undergraduate Course) - Getting students involved in mobile game design Inspired by Jim Mathews’ (2010) design studios for his high school students, I designed Local Games in ABQ for students to use mobile augmented reality game design as a way to learn about the city. We both leveraged our relatively autonomous classrooms (High School Social Studies, and College of Liberal Arts respectively) to structure new opportunities for our students using AR games. At my school, this has led to students creating AR games or using their de- signs in other classes, independent studies, vol- unteer work and internships. Beyond general reasons to offer students op - portunities to design games (Klopfer & Sheldon, 2010; Mathews, 2013), Local Games in ABQ was designed around four specific purposes relevant to the student population and program in which I teach: Programming toolkits Just as is the case with teachers and re- searchers, using software that makes it possible for non-programmers to develop games is a ne- cessity, given that my students rarely have prior programming experience. ARIS opens up the intellectually rich world of game design to stu- dents from all backgrounds. It is easy enough to learn how to use quickly, yet deep enough to provide opportunities and challenges for those who wish to dive deep. Students are not learning to use it as an end in itself — they are using it to find a way to say something meaningful about our city. This means that there is plenty of cre- ative work outside the technical areas of game design to engage. Focus on the outside world Making mobile AR games focuses at least some of our attention on the world outside the classroom walls. My program claims to believe highly in student-centered learning opportuni- ties that prepare them for the real world. This goal is difficult to achieve if students cannot leave the confines of the university where, al - most by definition, the professors set the agenda for what is important and what is to be done. As such, a focus on extending interactions outside of the classroom is essential. Realistic, but real, production goals The mobile, local setting for student work also has a way of offsetting the inevitable expec - tations for high production values that the stu- dents may derive from their own experience of games. The fidelity of interacting with the real world offsets the fact that they cannot techni - cally create Grand Theft Auto V , and that they are working with a very limited software plat - form. Further, the reality of the real world as a setting provides the design goal of connecting gameplay to life, something very few commer- cial games realize. Many students have found that they can successfully approach other fac- ulty, course assignments, and local institutions (such as museums) in order to conduct inde- pendent research using the methods of mobile game design they have learned in this class. In fact, mobile game design as a research method and product of student labor has quickly spread to my other classes and those of my colleagues. Student projects This section discusses two examples of how my students’ game design experiences have grown beyond the classroom. Gianna May - Jornadas and Quest for the Cities of Gold. May’s work is exemplary of how class projects can integrate with student’s other interests and provide the foundation for sig- nificant independent activity after the semester ends. May began my class with an interest in museums. She was already volunteering at the Albuquerque Museum and had anticipated seek- ing a career in the field. The freedom of a cur - riculum based on mobile game design allowed her to make use of her preexisting interest. For her major project in class, May developed Jorna- das , a local history game where the player moves to turn of the century Albuquerque. She used the collections at the museum to help tell her story and used her game as speculative work for Figure 2. Students in the Local Games in ABQ class meet in December 2010 to play each other’s games. 46 TechTrends • January/February 2014 Volume 58, Number 1 Gallery is also the first AR game I have person - ally enjoyed playing over a long period of time, months to years. I found that the idea of leav- ing my office to document recent graffiti was actually reason enough to go outside, and a fun competition emerged between me and other students who played. This may seem like a small thing, but I believe the long term relevance of AR gaming for learning depends on the possibil- ity of creating experiences using these tools and devices which engage without the usual coercion we associate with curriculum, but which still feel at least one step closer to learning than enter- tainment. It does not have to be ARIS While I have found ARIS to be a very use- ful tool, I do not imagine that what I do is “teach ARIS”. Some form of middleware is tremendously helpful in empowering normal people to use technology to create robust and responsive inter- active experiences, not just post content. Some of the good work done by students here has not been in the ARIS platform nor rightly deserves the moniker “game”; yet, it has been enabled by participating in a conversation where we are us- ing the idea of games as a way to think about what can be done locally in the world around us. One example of an AR game made with - out ARIS is from Matthew Martinez who used Google Sites to mock-up a communication plat- form in conversations with our Provost. This prototype eventually became his blog, which has been recognized as one of the top ten in the country (10 Provost Blogs to Read, n.d.). An- other example is from the Spanish departments’ graduate student Ruben Salido. He asked his Spanish 101 students to visit the Hispanic food trucks across town, and map and talk about them in Spanish using Yelp (www.yelp.com). Yelp is not a game platform in the traditional sense, but here it served to amplify and make communal the act of exploration of our community through the vector of the Spanish language. Motivating and Supporting Faculty The qualities I have outlined above about Mentira and working with my students are largely relevant to working specifically with fac - ulty, and yet there are some important additional factors. For instance, the perception that faculty do not see themselves as the primary agents of change regarding mobile technology and learn- ing is not altogether untrue. And, unlike the way that making a game can replace a writing assignment for students, or allow a researcher to produce data rather than look for it, engag- something bigger. May approached the museum with her prototype, looking for an opportunity to make a game to be actually used at the mu- seum as an accompaniment to one of their ex - hibits. She was successful and this summer pro- duced a new game that coordinates with one of their exhibits: Quest for the Cities of Gold . In the game, youth virtually accompany Coronado to NM through a mobile game and the museum’s artifacts. In addition to gaining some on-the- ground experience with mobile game design— an area that museums are currently becoming interested in —she gained practice in designing and implementing an experience within a cu - rated space. Ivan Kenarov - Digital Graffiti Gallery. Digi- tal Graffiti Gallery is a curation activity by Hon- ors student Ivan Kenarov and has had the largest impact of likely any ARIS game other than Men- tira or Dow Day (that is widely used to demon- strate the capabilities of ARIS to academic audi- ences since 2010). Digital Graffiti Gallery stands out as an especially plausible example of place-based data collection, and is was referenced as the example of such in both the pro- posal for and sub- sequent recruitment for participation in the million dollar Mobile Learning Incubator started in the fall of 2012 at the University of Wisconsin-Madi- son. Digital Graffiti Figure 3. Gianna May (2 nd from left) watches a playtest of her game Cities of Gold at the Albuquerque Museum in August 2013 Figure 4. Alyssa Concha plays Ivan Kenarov’s Digital Graffiti Gallery in November 2011. Volume 58, Number 1 TechTrends • January/February 2014 47 ing in mobile game design—at least at the begin- ning—is additive for faculty, not substitutive. It represents extra time, effort and resources, all of which are typically in short supply. The apparent unlikeliness of engaging faculty in mobile game development is at the same time the root of why I think it is a good strategy to tackle it in a local, grassroots, ad-hoc fashion. Finding the points of interest, opportunities for collaboration, time in schedules and pools of resources is an idiosyn- cratic enterprise, different at every institution. In what is becoming a dominant strategy, a teacher does not often create a game to deliver content to students in some fashion, but rather, designs a game that is an opportunity for stu- dents to create and work with content via the game engine and coordinated acts of writing, film making and other media production. This approach has the obvious advantages of side- stepping many technical hurdles on the teacher’s part, such as the responsibility for creating and coordinating media assets ahead of time, and greatly decreasing the time between conception and implementation of an idea that is student- centered and makes use of the students’ high- order thinking skills. For instance, Dr. Kathryn McKnight’s Visi- tas de la Colonia weaves through her 400-level Spanish Colonial Literature class in a novel way, and is a recent example of the strategy whereby students create content within the game. Visitas is built around the premise that the authors read by students in the course somehow visit mod- ern day Albuquerque and respond to what they find here. Visita is a good example of how sup - port and resources possible on the scale of the Local Games Lab ABQ can enable an individual instructor to quickly invent and implement new ideas. ARIS is used to amplify and make com- munal what otherwise might be an interesting but individual writing activity based on a set of readings. Last year, the Visita idea was quickly piloted at the end of the fall semester in two parts. In part one, students worked in teams to author dialogues between these visitors (each of the authors) and guides. Each dialogue was set at a real place near or on campus, where some ob- servation triggered the visitor’s thoughts. Each dialogue ended with a question, and each group produced two possible answers. They used the ARIS Notebook to store the dialogue, evocative imagery and/or videos, the questions, and the location of the fictitious conversation for con - sumption in part two. In part two, each group picked their favor- ite conversation and made it visible to the other groups on the map in ARIS. Then each group visited each of the other locations and witnessed each conversation. At each location, they had to de- cide which of the authors was speaking and choose which of the two possible answers was most authen- tic. For this, they used the like/comment system in the ARIS Notebook. Afterwards, the class re - grouped and discussed the outcomes. The pilot went reasonably well, and McK- night decided to iterate on the design. For this semes- ter’s version, we have inte - grated the game-like activ- ity into the semester’s re - search. We are also making use of last year’s content to introduce the new students to the concept and genre of writing in which they will be expected to perform. Visitas is interesting for how it incorporates mobile game design into a curriculum in lightweight yet recursive ways. Though there is no reason this activity would need to be supported by a mobile platform, it certainly gains from the affordances of mobility, from the coordinated delivery of multimedia as- sets to the collective production of a single col- laborative asset. Visitas is also important because of the lightweight and informal nature in which it launched and is being iterated. The entire plan- ning and training consisted of three, one-hour conversations. McKinght had some prior knowl- edge about Mentira , but no real shared experience or expertise in mobile or games. Her relevant ex - pertise, what made it easy to get an interesting idea off the ground, is that she is a thoughtful and inventive instructor deeply committed to im- proving her students’ learning in her courses. The support that we provided consisted of providing (a) impetus to begin a project; (b) consultation to quickly refine her ideas into a testable proto - type; and (c) resources and mobile devices (iPod Touches) to implement in her class, mere weeks after we began. Lastly, it is important to remember that McK- night is in the driver’s seat with Visitas . She was a newcomer to mobile games and place, but this project exists and continues to see out her evolving vision, not our vision as researchers. We respect her instincts and experience as an instructor to direct the project. We are supporting her agenda rather than implementing our own. Figure 5. A screenshot from Visitas de la Colonia. Student created multimedia notes are scattered across the UNM campus. 48 TechTrends • January/February 2014 Volume 58, Number 1 The Future of Local Games Local place has much to offer when it comes to reimagining how learning in schools can connect to our lives outside of them. By mak- ing local place more than a component of con- tent delivery, a key aspect of technological ex - perimentation and program development for learning, we can produce more than games to fit curricular niches; we can produce a commu - nity. Games present interesting possibilities for the design of learning environments. By mak- ing games ourselves, they become part of our vernacular, which becomes language that can help us redefine what it means to learn. Mobile technology is a disruptive force in our culture. By creating with it, instead of reacting to it, we become capable of redirecting our instructional efforts to more meaningful activity. Through the creation and operation of the Local Games Lab ABQ, we have begun a process of self-determination among the faculty and stu- dents at my institution across a variety of disci- plines and pedagogical moments. Along several parallel tracks, most only a person or two wide, people with little or no technological background are inventing the future of technology and learn- ing for themselves, one prototype at a time. The idea of doing educational technology on a local, inventive basis stands in some contrast with how we usually think about producing and scaling educational technology. 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