Your looking an my grandmother here (yep – she was a beauty!). This is the video overview of my digital story which I created on ARIS Games as an activity in my content unit for Assignment 3. I tend not to present things until they are complete and I feel good about them. This is definitely a beta concept video.

Stay-tuned for an update. I will be comparing this video and the game it is based on, with a new iteration. I will also document that process.

Updated Video

This is the second iteration and the one that will be the model on my Moodle site for Unit 2. This one is more of a trailer than a demo. It is designed to entice students in my Online Geography 12 course to investigate the game, the ARIS Games platform and the first stage of the geographic inquiry process – asking good geographic questions.

I’m going to write more, but this part of the project has taken me much longer than I budgeted. I’ll be back soon with a rationale and comments. Hope you enjoy it

It was an interesting exercise making a new orientation video for my game because in the process of creating it on iMovie and working on my Moodle content unit, I ended-up changing it for the better. Originally, the game was going to be a narrative that students would simply follow by touching ‘continue’. I realized that is wasn’t very ‘gamified’ for a game, and that the badges came across more as didactic reminders than as question prompts.

My new iteration – and the one reflected by this second ‘teaser’ video – requires players to key-in geographic question to keep the game moving. In other words: no question, no progress. I also created more mystery and incentive to finish by not disclosing who is speaking through the ring. In fact, I completely took by great-grandfather out of the game altogether, except for a picture. The way it operates now is that players are confronted with a pre-badge (my term). They get to collect the badge but it serves as a prompt to ask a question at that time. Their reward is the ability to continue.

As stand alone game with no context, people may ask why a player would choose to make the effort to construct geographic questions. I made it to function as the orientation stage in the Constructivist Instruction Model (CIM) by requiring them to script what they think is an appropriate question. The big deal here is the geographic inquiry all hinges on the creating of specifically geo-type questions. From there, the stages are: acquire information (data), explore, analyze and act. After playing the game, students author their own ARIS game based on their family migration story that asks improved questions. In between my game and their’s they have an online discussion and evaluate each other’s two best questions. The whole idea is that they get continual practice with the skill.

Last detail, there actually is a ring! My great-grandfather bought a ring at the end of the First World War with the money the City of Liverpool awarded him for being an officer in the home guard. The ring went from him, to my grandfather, and then to me. It was fun for me to create the game using my own family history.