Lava flows down the halls of Main Street Middle School, in Montpelier, Vermont, and you must choose whether you’ll go with the flow or try to cool off somewhere and become an igneous rock. In another portion of the school, you’re the new kid, getting a tour from one of your peers when a volcano erupts, and you have only your geology wits (and a science teacher with fabulous hair) to save you.
These are middle schoolers building mobile, place-based games with ARIS, taking advantage of the game editor’s powerful new re-design and one science educator’s trust in letting his students demonstrate what and how they learn.
Alert reader Lucia Hoegeveen asked a question about our suggestion that you create a map of a country and give each state it’s own voice. Now, as she pointed out, each Chatterpix you create can have only one mouth. So in order to make our Chatter-map, we’re going to need to app-smash Chatterpix in one of a couple different ways.
Or maybe we’ll just put them all together in a blender and hope for the best. I’ll let you know after I finish this delicious coffee.
Local educators and students presenting at Vermont state conference
“Do Make Create: Exploring Creative Ideas for the Classroom”
If you’re one of the many folks planning on attending Dynamic Landscapes 2014, the annual state-wide conference for Vermont’s education scene, be sure to check out these Edmunds and Essex students and educators! They’re presenting at this year’s conference.
Kathy Gallagher, Carole Renca and their students will be presenting “Creating a 21st Century School-wide Reading Community” Thursday at 1:30pm. They’ll be joined by Geoff Gevalt from the Young Writers Project.
Also Thursday morning are Eric Schoembs (Edmunds) and Dan Trenis (Lyman C. Hunt Middle School), presenting on “3D Printing: Prototype, Products, and Processes”.
At the ARIS session, we’ll be playing “Shape Invaders”, a game of geometry and aliens created by GEMS technologist Angelique Fairbrother.
And Friday during the noon hour, students and facilitators from the Edge Academy at Essex Middle School will be talking “Engagement to Empowerment: Students at the Center of Change”. As we recently saw with the second full year of Edge’s Wild City Project, this is a truly effective and dynamic group of school game-changers. Do NOT miss this session.
Congratulations to both the educators and students for taking this opportunity to share their experiences at the state-wide level!
If you’re interested in hearing from Laura Botte and Katie Wyndorf about this project, they’ll be at the 7th annual Middle Grades Conference, January 11th at UVM.
A group of Edmunds 6th graders check out Echo’s tidepool exhibit while collecting resources to build their own ARIS video games.
ARIS stands for Augmented Reality Interactive Storytelling, and it’s an open-source platform published by the University of Wisconsin to allow K-12 students to design and create their own place-based games for the iOS mobile platform. Museums across the country are starting to incorporate augmented reality to make visitors’ experiences more in-depth and authentic; where once students might’ve simply read a plaque about the lives of fur traders at the Minnesota Historical Society, now they have a chance to play the role of one, working through some of the challenges and hardships the life presented in order to advance through the tour.
And where Minnesota has fur traders, the Echo Center has frogs.
Meet Vinnie.
Vinnie is a native Vermont bullfrog whose life and habits were drawn directly from Echo Center exhibits by Burlington School District technology information specialists and TIIE to form the short ARIS game “Frogworld”.
Students worked their way through the Frogworld game by gleaning information from plaques in Echo’s Frogworld exhibit. They also documented resources from the Echo Center exhibits for later use in their own games. Echo Center staff also got into the act. Executive director Phelan Fretz used ARIS’ Notebook feature to contribute his own frog to the Frogworld game, then spent lunch taking suggestions from students as to what kinds of behind-the-scenes information Echo could provide to support students’ own ARIS games.
Phelan Fretz, Echo Center director, used ARIS’ Notebook feature to add this commentary about one of the frogs in the Frogworld exhibit. Players can leave text, audio, image or video notes for all other players to read.
ARIS is one of a number of augmented reality platforms the Echo Center is piloting with local schools.
Edmunds is incorporating ARIS into a yearlong place-based unit examining the Lake Champlain basin through environmental, cultural, historic and opportunity lenses. The Echo Center hopes to make the local 6th graders’ ARIS games available to visitors as part of the museum tour when they’re completed.
Following up on our intro to ARIS with geometry last Friday, this morning the 6th graders from Edmunds Middle School spent some time at the Echo Lake Aquarium and Science Center working through “Frogworld”, a demo ARIS game that made use of items at the Echo Center. After they played the game, they spent some time with the rest of the (non-frog) exhibits, collecting ideas for items they could incorporate into their own games.
We’re back at it tomorrow at Echo with another class of 6th graders. More news as it develops.
Pop quiz, hotshot. What do geometry, aliens and the augmented reality gaming platform all have in common?
A: All were spotted last Friday at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington.
As part of a unit on exploring place, educators Laura Botte and Katie Wyndorf are having their students work with the free iOS app ARIS, an open-source game-creation platform. To kick things off, they collaborated with Angelique Fairbrother, technology coordinator for Franklin West SU, in bringing an introductory ARIS game into Edmunds’ classrooms. And out into the hallways. Also sometimes under the desks and on top of the lockers.
The two classes of 6th graders played “Shape Invaders”, a game where aliens ask for help with geometry. Students had to locate and scan QR codes scattered around the school, using them to collect various shapes. In order to keep the aliens happy, students then calculated the perimeter and area of each shape.
Students worked in teams to solve the clues necessary to come up with the area and perimeter of each shape — skills not usually encountered in 6th grade math. With a little help and a whole lot of persistence, the aliens were appeased and the students got an introduction to the ARIS platform.
Next week, the Edmunds students will be heading to the Echo Lake Aquarium and Science Center to build their own ARIS games around the themes of culture, ecology, history and sustainability.
FWSU technology coordinator Angelique Fairbrothers introduces two Edmunds students how to make changes to the game in ARIS’ web-based editor.
Lava flows down the halls of Main Street Middle School, in Montpelier, Vermont, and you must choose whether you’ll go with the flow or try to cool off somewhere and become an igneous rock. In another portion of the school, you’re the new kid, getting a tour from one of your peers when a volcano erupts, and you have only your geology wits (and a science teacher with fabulous hair) to save you.
