I had another good day yesterday at ALT-C 2008, and was very pleased to finally meet Juliette Culver, Alex Moseley and Daniel Livingstone – all doing excellent work in games and education.The talk here has been very much centered on the potential of ARGs in teaching and learning and it’s great to talk to other people without having to explain the concepts from first principles. Looks like ARGs might be the next big thing?Alex did an fantastic talk on the educational lessons that can be learned from ARGs, which struck a lot of chords with some of our recent ARGOSI findings. In his sample of ARG players he found that the three reasons that people took part were: a) to solve puzzles, b) to uncover the story, and c) to be part of a community. He also presented seven key features of ARGs for education:
- Problem solving at varying levels (graded challenge)
- Progress and rewards (leaderboard, grand prize)
- Narrative devices (characters, plot, story)
- Influence on outcomes
- Regular delivery of new problems/events
- Potential for large, active community
- Based on simple, existing technologies/media
