Plotting Our Process

Welcome to the Our Year in the Pod blog.  Daniel and I will be using this blog to document our year working with teachers and students to develop and implement Augmented Reality games in their schools.  What does that mean, though?  Well, it's tough to explain in one post, so you'll have to follow the blog to know exactly, but the basic elements are to build narrative-based games that leverage technologies that overlay virtual information on the real world.  Sounds cool, doesn't it?

Our first step is to outline a year-long effort to build resources and capacity within the educational arena.  We'll be focusing on five different things:

1. Developing a series of ready-made AR games that teachers can use.
2. Training teachers to build the games themselves.
3. Getting students prepared to build these types of games.
4. Developing and distributing web-based materials for playing and building these games.
5. Documenting and researching the whole shebang.  We want to make sure that we let people know not only about what we are doing, but about how it is going as it is happening.

The first step is to meet with teachers and play a bunch of games so that they see the potential of these tools in their classroom.  As such, we're developing a series of mini-games that can be used early in the school year as review tools at the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th grade levels.  As those get done, we'll share them and tell you how they can be used.