Mobile urban drama for multimedia-based out-of-school learning

Abstract

This paper describes the notion of Mobile Urban Drama and how a particular production is implemented to support engaging experiences via location-based mobile phone software. Mobile Urban Drama is a general concept that has been adapted for outof-school learning projects by introducing support for solving assignments and producing multimedia-based documentation for learning purposes. Media production is seamlessly supported through a context-aware media management system. The Mobile Urban Drama project, "HASLEINTERACTIVE", is presented. It supports biology, geography and math lessons for 7 th to 9 th graders in schools. The story is an environmental thriller that takes place partly on the pupils' mobile phones and partly in the real worldin nature, which must be investigated through exercises. The level of pupil engagement is evaluated through interviews with teachers and pupils, as well as an analysis of pupil productivity and produced media materials during the interactive Mobile Urban Drama experience. It is argued how the out-of-school learning features are successfully supported by the system, and we conclude that the level of productivity and engagement is higher than in usual pupil group work.

Castor: Designing and experimenting a context-aware architecture for creating stories outdoors

“…We had a confirmation about this issue when, in the few cases where there were slight differences between the icons used in classroom and outdoors, the children complained that the app interface wasn't "correct". In this sense the experiment confirmed the role that may have mobile devices, coupled with good design, for a valuable integration of symbol manipulation and practical experience [10].…”

“…Hansen et al [10] take advantage of the Mobile Urban Drama platform [11] for designing an environmental drama where storytelling and study of natural sciences are mixed. The students listened to the narration delivered by mobile devices, but at the same time were asked to perform different assignments, involving sketching, collecting soil tests and taking pictures.…”

“…The authors of the study underline the importance of learning outdoors, that stimulates the practical intelligence instead of the theoretical school intelligence [12] and the use of mobile devices that contribute to bridge the gap between symbol manipulation and contextualized reasoning. Both the [7,10] approaches offer a very structured experience in terms of the content delivered to children, for inspiring the creation of stories or for stimulating the gathering of data. Both of them are more focused on the gathering of materials and on the solution of assignments rather than on the creation of narrations in situ.…”

“…In [19] the user history is used for enabling proactive presentation of content in a virtual fair. The available implementations for the educational domain often limit the use of the context to the location [7,10], for delivering appropriate content and augmenting the user engagement. The importance of the location for the user engagement is underlined in [9] also for the authoring phase: the curators that prepared the content for the children involved in the exploration of the Chawton House stressed that they could make a rich and detailed audio recording related to a specific location only because they were there.…”

Creating Web3D educational stories from crowdsourced annotations

“…We claim that the application of storytelling techniques to annotated 3D worlds belonging to the cultural heritage domain can bring great advantages for researchers and pupils. The benefits of storytelling for educational experiences have been demonstrated by several studies [10,11]. As far as cultural heritage is concerned, in literature there are different examples showing how storytelling techniques can be profitably used for engaging students while learning.…”