Checkout the photos here and here.

See the original announcement.

Over the course of 3 days, over 100 participants, living in 4 countries and 11 states, created 127 games; 19 of which were showcased in the closing ceremony. That averages 5,000 hours of total development time across the planet in making new mobile experiences; or 263 hours/final game submitted.

Participants ranged from teams of middle school and high school students to professors. Private industry, museums, educators, game designers, and the generally curious gathered to have fun, learn from each other, and quickly iterate some of the most creative ideas mobile has seen.

Day one involved a quick intro, guidelines for the jam and workshops for those that were new to the ARIS engine. Day two was broken into ‘sprints’ and ‘check-ins’ that helped teams develop and dump ideas quickly and towards the creation of a larger game. Day three was a mad rush to the end on games that made the final cut, and preparation to quickly show the basic game concept to other jammers through a live video stream of all the locations. Professional videographer Dave O. rapidly filmed and edited a video for the event and organizer Chris Blakesley put together a slideshow for participants to share their games at the end.

Using ARIS with actual professionals and educators (and students!) has been the fruition of about 2.5 years of work by graduate students in the Games + Learning + Society research group, faculty at the University of New Mexico and staff members of the Academic Technology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Instead of solely making games, the vision of ARIS is to exist as an open source platform that lets anyone make their own games! Thanks to the feedback received from this Global Game Jam, the full beta version of ARIS is extremely close to completion.

Also, the Engage Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has selected ARIS as a new Adaptation Award topic – which means UW-Madison faculty and students will be using the ARIS engine to develop mobile games as a learning approach during the next 1-2 years.

The ARIS Global Jam was organized by Chris Blakesley, Seann Dikkers, Chris Holden, Jim Mathews, John Martin, and project lead David Gagnon. Special thanks to David McHugh, Sajiah Hall, and Philip Dougherty for their support during the jam. This event would not have happened without the support of DoIT Academic Technology and ENGAGE program.

The Games

In “Using a studio-based pedagogy to engage students in the design of mobile-based media,” Jim outlines a learning model that puts students students in the role of designers, learning by production.

Over the next six months we will using funds provided by the Mobile Learning Institute to develop and test these workshop plans as well as provide upgrades and bug fixes to ARIS, making it an even more creative and easy mobile learning design tool.

Kurt Squire, associate education professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to approach change differently—as a videogame designer would—by employing rapid prototyping of an idea and tons of user testing.

“I’m adverse to the model in education where there’s a group of people who develop this thing that is going to solve all your problems, that’s going to be your silver bullet,” Squire said. “I want to make education more participatory.”

In 2008, Squire, who is also a leader in the Games, Learning and Society initiative, a group of more than 50 faculty and students investigating game-based learning, at UW-Madison, started designing a curriculum that took advantage of mobile technology….

Read the rest of the story at: http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/prototyping-our-way-to-reforming-education/

Wow. That was quite a ride!

Here are my reflections on the 3 day design session in Madison. Other team members may have differing opinions.

Our team set out to do a few things in just 3 short days:

1. Improve Dow Day
2. Produce some new mobile game designs
3. Learn about how to facilitate a design Jam
4. Hopefully make some improvements to the ARIS software and editor through 1 and 2

In summary, we met all those goals (and then some), even though everything moved a little slower and a little harder than we expected.

Improve Dow Day

1. Rebuilt the intro video to explain the purpose and content of the game
2. Replaced all the images to use the new large screen dimensions
3. Tuned the dialog so text doesn’t require as much scrolling
4. Tuned a few of the locations so they trigger at the right time

Produce some New Mobile Game Designs

1. Contested Spaces – A new lens to view your world. As you walk around campus, notice places where different interests come into conflict and comment on them by  geo-tagged and shared videos, sounds and photos.
2. Robots! – A race of robots has been stranded on earth and you need to help them find their way home by taking photos of the robot icons that have been painted on roads and buildings around downtown Madison.
3. Madison Tower Defense – Unit 6, the package has been dropped at the locations mared by your GPS. Retrieve it and make your way to the extraction point before being spotted by the guards or sentry guns.
4. Dow Media Tour – A dozen locations on campus have footage from the protests in 1967. Visit the places where photos and videos were taken and look out on the world from that perspective.
5. Lakeshore Tour – If only the trees could talk! From 100 years ago to current project, the walking path from the Memorial Union to the Hospital has so many stories to tell. We remade a previously designed phone based tour using ARIS while beefing up the design in a number of ways.

Learn About How to Facilite a Design Jam

Process

We used a cool method to run a design session like a agile software development project that I think was very effective. Here is how it worked:

1. The day was divided into 2 hour long “iterations,” from 10am-12pm for example.
2. A whiteboard had the catagories ‘current’, ‘backlog’ and ‘icebox’ written on it. On the sides were ‘done’ and ‘dead’ areas.
3. Each member of the team wrote in single tasks they would like to preform in a short chunk of time on post-it notes and “pitched” the ideas to the other members.
4. Short-term small teams would form around ideas that sounded the most compelling and feasible and placed in the ‘current’ or ‘backlog’ catagory on the whiteboard.
5. Ideas that generated less excitement slipped into the ‘icebox’ or ‘dead’ idea piles.
6. We would work like nuts for the length of the iteration, usually 2-3 hours.
7. When the time limit was up, the team debriefed, adjusted goals and picked the next set of current tasks. Only ‘delivered value’ kinds of things, not research, chores, etc. counted toward progress.

Other Lessons

1. Design Jams work best for producing new scrappy ideas, not polishing existing ideas. The excitment of it all makes having deep understandings of things difficult.
2. Prepare as much media and subject research upfront as possible. We wasted precious time getting caught up on the details of the topics we were designing around and finding media for them.
3. Play-test more often! Even though I harp on this to anyone who will listen, we still crammed in lots of ideas without field testing them many times. The result was that some of the ideas didn’t work as planned or lacked simple fixes that would have been obvious if we would have just tried them first.
4. Drop Box and Google Docs are awesome tools for rapid collaboration.
5. Work in a venue with food/coffee/beer nearby. This saved us so much time and kept the team going.
6. Have a large whiteboard, markers, post its, a projector, maps, pins and lots of other supplies nearby. It really lets ideas flow when you aren’t looking for supplies.
7. Plan a public playtest at the end of the Jam. It kept our focus tight. We needed to have something PLAYABLE not just talked about.

Improve ARIS

Right away, we found a bug in the client that had somehow slipped through that causes the device to crash randomly. We will have an update up on the AppStore in a few weeks.

We also seriously beefed up the editor. Now authors can create quests and dialog using simplified interfaces. They can also add and remove items from the player and use quantities of items in a requirement. All in all, normal folks can now make some really cools games.

The Jam also highlighted a number of features we still want to see such as background audio while walking, better data collection tools, a better way to embed an intro video and cutscenes and better end f conversation scripts.

Day 0 – Pre Jam Prep

Starting on the 2nd, Dee Johnson and I will be banging out as many quick fixes to the authoring tool as we can muster in a day in effort to unlock the other designers in the following days.

Day 1 – Narrative Design and Public Workshop

The 3rd will concentrate Narrative in Mobile Games. We will use an already great game, Dow Day, as the inspiration. We want to prototype things like locative soundtracks/background audio, immersive simulated conversation, more augmented reality historical media, realtime events and learn some lessons about narrative pacing in outdoor settings.

From 3-5 pm on the 3rd, half of the team will facilitate a public ARIS workshop where participants will:

• Learn about what kinds of experience ARIS is designed to produce
• Learn how to construct locative tour activities
• Test their tour in the field
• Learn how to use requirements to produce sequential activities
• Design a simple “data collection” activity where players must take a photo to see the next part of the game

Please RSVP here if you want to attend.

Day 2 – Data Collection Designs

The 4th will move the teams into a field we have all been excited about, participant data collection games.

Too often, designers think about handhelds as a way to push information out, not as a method for pulling information in. We are going to come up with a set of designs (and likely new features to ARIS) that will use the devices camera, microphone, GPS, keypad and map to show how collecting information, marking maps and sharing data can make for engaging mobile learning games.

Day 3 – Production and Public Playtest

Friday will be a chance to finish up some of the ideas from the previous sessions and to bang out some designs that already have the pieces lined up.

From 4:30-6 pm we will host a public play test of our new designs to anyone interested in participating. Everyone will gather in UW Memorial Union Rathkeller room and spend the next hour and a half running around campus, iphones in hand. Bring ‘em if you have ‘em.

Please RSVP here if you want to attend.

The alpha editing tool, which works pretty well for making simple tours and linear stories, is now worth sharing broadly. It has been tested long enough that we know what works and what doesn’t and it seems, that despite its short-comings, it might jumpstart a lot of folks’ mobile design ideas. So, lets cut the application process out of the mix and let everyone start fiddling with it!

So. If you want to get started with making ARIS experiences, goto the arisgames.org/make page and check out the training vids. They will show you how to access and work with the tool. Also make sure to register for the google group so we can stay in touch.

In other news, we now have over 100 people making ARIS content and experimenting with the platform all around the globe! Special shout-out to the folks in Sweden and Spain for their cool design ideas. I also see a lot of activity in New Zealand and Australia, how exciting!