Games and Place-Based Pedagogy
With recent advances in mobile and virtual reality technology, one of the newest areas of research into educational gaming is augmented reality games. In these games, players are outfitted with a mobile technology enabled with a global positioning system (GPS). This type of technology uses a satellite signal to pinpoint the location of a person anywhere in the world.
By using software loaded into these technologies, the designer can create games that use aspects of both the real and virtual world in seamless union to enhance the learning experience for students.
One of the most common pedagogical approaches relying on these technologies is based on place-based education. This education theory stems from the work of writers such as Henry David Thoreau (The Walden Woods Project, 2005) and John Dewey (Kehrberg, n.d.).
In place-based pedagogy, the emphasis on learning is situated in its experiential value. Learning is enhanced by the learner’s familiarity with the history and activity of the place which is encouraged by extended engagement with it. Some of the benefits of such pedagogy, according to its proponents, are that learners come to appreciate the full meaning of the local spaces they inhabit, and more importantly perhaps, their connection to the broader body of human knowledge (The Walden Woods Project, 2005).
Virtual Reality Vs. Augmented Reality
The two main approaches that are currently under research for place-based games use virtual reality augmented game (VRAG) or augmented reality game (ARG) technologies in their implementation. Even though most educators would not use the two terms separately, arguing that all the technologies involved in these approaches actually enhance a reality, it becomes a useful, practical distinction because of its implications for the classroom.
On one side, virtual reality augmented games take advantage of usually expensive virtual reality (VR) glasses that superimpose computer-generated images over the person’s perception of the real world. The result can be a powerful hybrid representation where the objects that are not really there can be simulated with simple perceptual stimulation. For example, having a player pick up a card emblazoned with a symbol that, once interpreted by the VR software, gets translated into a complex 3D representation of an object.
On the other hand, a more traditional approach to augmented reality is to use cheaper handheld technologies, like cell phones and PDAs, to generate content that players can see when certain actions in the real world are triggered. For example, the PDA might play a video of a game character giving additional information on a puzzle to the players when the GPS detects they have entered a locale in the real world.