One project that I’ve been watching with interest over the past year is the ARGuing project, which used an alternate reality game for language learning in secondary schools across Europe.
A key feature of this project was that it made use of a network of teachers to support the delivery of the game, and the involvement of this resource is key to the methodology developed by the project. I had an interesting chat with Joel Josephson, one of the project partners, recently (who incidentally runs a children’s educational gaming site that is well worth a look) about the appropriateness of this model in Higher Education and the difficulties of getting staff engaged and able to devote time and energy to the extent seen in the ARGuing project.
One of the key issues of ARGs in education is engaging players, and the time required to provide the ongoing interaction that supports this (particularly in the early stages of the game) was one of the difficulties encountered in the ARGOSI project, and I think that looking at solutions employed in other education sectors could provide some valuable ideas here.
