Being able to accommodate activity's formal purposes as a critical factor when designing for 'location-based learning games' at scale

Abstract

Over the past few years the use mobile technologies for learning has attracted the interest of practitioners in all phases of education to facilitate informal learning in formal contexts (Bachmair, Cook, & Kress, 2010). Key aspects of such interests are the growing significance of mobile devices in learners' everyday lives (Vinu, Sherimon, & Krishnan, 2011), the increasing portability of these technologies, as well as the reduction in their cost and services. Also, the use of mobile technology in education has led to a new educational paradigm in which students can learn anytime and anywhere (Jones & Jo, 2004; Vinu et al., 2011).

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In this paper we discuss one of the key lessons learnt in the case studies. The lesson learnt has to do with how the teachers accommodated their formal educational purposes in the design of the location-based game. In particular, the possibilities of our model to support assessment purposes was consider critical in two cases when considering the use of this type of games. The designs created in the case studies include: a) an extracurricular learning activity designed by 7 teachers with the purpose of discovering and learning about l’Hospitalet (i.e. the city where the school is placed); b) a summative assessment activity designed by 1 teacher about the art history of Vic; and c) a formative assessment activity designed by 1 teacher to revise concepts associated to different pictures of a contemporary art museum. Interestingly, teachers’ decisions when applying some of the puzzle game board design elements (especially the scoring and feedback mechanisms) varied significantly depending on the formal purposes. Acknowledgement. This research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness in the EEE Project (TIN2011-28308-C03-03).

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