ARIS Summit 2015

The Great STEM Caper is game designed to provide a goal-oriented learning experience that engages players in the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices with exhibits at a hands-on science center in Kansas City.  The mixed-methods study looked at several different outcomes.  The Motivation to Learn Science Questionnaire was administered in a pre/post design to determine whether in-game victories (a.k.a. "fiero" experiences) would serve as "mastery experiences" (Bandura, 1997) that would result in an increase in science self-efficacy.  Participants also played the game in same-sex pairs so that gender differences in gameplay and perceptions of the game could be examined.  In each trial, one male pair and one female pair wore a GoPro camera to record their first-person perspective of interaction with the game, the exhibits, their partner, and other teams.  40+ hours of GoPro footage reveal some very interesting differences in the way that boys and girls played the game.  One of the interesting findings is that the girls significantly outperformed the boys on every measure of game achievement.  Finally, follow-up interviews with a sample of participants provide insight into the players’ perception of the gameplay experience.

Dilemma 1944 takes students back to Kitsilano High School in Vancouver, Canada in May of 1944, a month before D-Day and over a year before the end of the Second World War. Learners become a graduating student who is in the process of deciding whether or not to join the Canadian Forces fighting in Europe and Asia.

Sustainable U engages players on a quest to save Madison from an apocalyptic environmental future. The speakers will discuss the iterative process that brought the game to its final design, which uses a series of interactive mini-games that are housed within an ARIS shell.

A field trip to a farm with goats, and chickens, and cows - oh my! But wait, I get to use an iPad and augmented reality too? This session will provide a quick overview of a farm field trip where 100 4th graders learned about being farmhands through live demonstrations with farm staff. Students experienced a fence-making activity, petting baby goats, and even looking at real goat poop under a microscope to inspect it for parasites! An ARIS activity scaffolded their mission, added some flair, and directed them to each station. Did augmented reality actually augment the experience or would "regular" reality be equally as effective or (yikes!) even better in this scenario? The presenters are “on the fence” – so help us decide!

ARISE (Augmented Reality Integrated Simulation for Education) is part of the Advancing Careers and Training for Healthcare (ACT for Healthcare) fourth round national Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training(TAACCT) grant in the state of WI with a goal to to enhance healthcare training programs by merging simulation scenarios with augmented reality and game based situated learning theory. Utilizing ARIS, the ARISE team will create 150 healthcare scenarios with corresponding curricula over a three year period which will be open source through skillscommons.org and MERLOT. 

In mid 2014, we began an NEH funded project that aims to develop a prototype for a location-based game centered on historical events surrounding orientation sessions at Western College for Women in preparation for the Mississippi Summer Project, in which students trained for civil rights activism in Mississippi in June of 1964. In June-August, we conducted a game ideation and design process with preliminary playtests, created a playtest survey, created a game in ARIS 1.0, and consulted with humanities experts and civil rights veterans. In October, we hosted several playtests with participants and speakers of the Freedom Summer conference in Oxford, OH. These early playtests led us to a better understanding of how the genre of a location-based game may work with our content, and it gave us a deeper understanding of the audience needs and behavior. With the feedback we received in 2014 along with the release of ARIS 2.0, in early 2015, we re-built the game, re-created most of the media content, and consolidated the story into only 4-5 scenes. In April, we hosted a playtest with 40+ students from an American History class and we are planning for more playtests in the summer and later this year.