Teaching History with Augmented Reality

On the heels of our recent discussions concerning the use of Civilization IV in teaching history, I found a nice paper of a work in progress over in Italy, which outlines a combination site visit with mobile phones to create an active game for students at a historic site. Historia Ludens in Italy offers students opportunities to engage in historical sites rather than simply visit them. The paper outlines how one of the games works:

“Gaius’ Day” is structured like a treasure hunt to be played by a class of students: it combines the excitement of both chase and solving the case with the joy of freely exploring a place and discovering its hidden secrets. This type of game is perfectly suited to the archaeological site context, with wide spaces where students can freely move and use their intelligence and imagination to conjure up how life used to be there, by observing the site and memorizing places, names and functions.

Students are divided into groups at the site, given rules and instructions, maps and a glossary of terms. Group leaders use a cellular phone to mark the position of their finds, and reference a three dimensional model of the target site.

It’s a neat article, and a neat idea. Seems like it could be replicated most anywhere.

References:
Ardito, C., Costabile, M.F., Lanzilotti, R., & Pederson, T. (2007). Making dead history come alive through mobile game-play. Paper presented at CHI 2007, San Jose, CA. [Online.] Available: http://www.di.uniba.it/~ivu/papers/CHI07_ardito_GaiusDay.pdf

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1. Mathematics Education Blog » Blog Archive » Teaching History with Augmented Reality — December 16, 2007 @ 11:12 am

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