Some of the ARIS team (Chris Holden, Seann Dikkers, and I) are at the the Meaningful Play conference at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. Chris, being the ARIS advocate that he is, printed off some epic flyers and has been distributing them since we’ve been here.

On Day 2 of the conference, we led a 2.5-hour ARIS workshop. Chris led participants through a basic tutorial of ARIS, guiding them in the creation of a basic narrative-based game. We then demonstrated how the Notebook could be used to engage in easy-to-configure data collection activities. During our break, we sent participants out to play two data-collection games Chris made for the conference: Fall Colors @ Meaningful Play – a collective photography exercise, and Meaningful Games – a game to provoke storytelling around important games in peoples’ lives. The attendees continued playing these games throughout the remainder of the conference, joined by other conference participants.

On Friday (Day 3 of the conference), the three of us delivered a paper that focused on an analysis of the examples of mobile use from the recent book Mobile Media Learning: Amazing Uses of Mobile Devices for Learning. Specifically, Seann took the lead in presenting the paper and used Jim Mathew’s Up the River case as an illustrative example of many of the themes we’ve seen across cases.

I spent my time during the hour-long session making a very special game for Chris: Play Chris Holden! It can be played anywhere and will give players an opportunity to see all of the games that Chris has made. I haven’t had time to complete the full game list yet, but hopefully I will soon – Chris has a lot of ARIS games under his belt.

I’ve found myself talking a lot about the new custom maps feature in the ARIS editor (thanks Garrett!). I personally am really excited about the possibility of making a proper treasure map game using this feature. So, I’m trying to get others equally excited about it! [Hint: stop reading now and go make me a treasure map game on ARIS. (:]

We’ve had a lot of fun here meeting current ARIS users and introducing more people to the platform! It’s been exciting to reunite with some of the non-Madison-based ARIS team, and I am really excited to see what games and partnerships emerge from this conference.

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Breanne Litts
Project Assistant, Mobile Learning Incubator
University of Wisconsin-Madison

P.S. After I left, Chris and some other conference participants found some sweet brick inlays…he insisted I share.