Gamification and the Annual Meeting of Court

UCS held it's Annual Meeting of the Court on 30th June.  Learning Services' involvement was to take part in the market place, where departments from around UCS can showcase their work to both staff and the wider business community.

Learning Services joined up with two other departments from within the Academic Services directorate, Student Support and Infozone.   To bring the stands together as one, it was decided that the stand should be interactive.  One of the areas that Learning Services has been exploring is 'Gamification' and the use of game mechanics to better engage with students around study skills/digital literacy workshops.

The technologies team (Elevate) with Learning Services has been developing a number of ways to build a Gamification framework, included in this framework is the development of Open and Digital Badges.

The stand, pictured below, hosted a number of posters displaying the current projects including an Augmented Reality heritage lottery funded project at Holywells Park.  Learning Services have introduced a number of technologies to improve the visitor experience.

To tie the different departments together a number of quiz questions were produced that were easily answerable from the information contained in the posters.  A selection of questions from each department created three quizzes.  The quizzes were loaded in iPads that made up part of the stand, visitors were asked to answer the quizzes, and a successfully completed quiz, would entitle that participant to an Open Badge.

The quiz statistics were shown live on the screen in the stand.  The Gamification and Open Badge development to date has led Learning Services to believe that badges should not be issued purely for attendance.  A requirement for some form of reflection or activity which then triggers the badge has a much better response.

The photograph below shows a number of attendees participating in a quiz:

The live statistics that were shown from the quizzes included number of attempts, average time taken and which questions were answered correctly/incorrectly.  A sample of these stats are shown below:

Please get in touch with Learning Services if you would like to discuss the use of Gamification in your course at  UCS.

Holywells Park AR Project

Holywells Park stables

The Elevate Team have been working closely with the Holywells Park Heritage Lottery Funded project run by Ipswich Borough Council.

The project is restoring some of the original features to the park as well as making more of its history available to the visiting public. We are supporting the project by offering our technical expertise around the use and creation of location aware activities.

We are developing two activities for the park and supporting the UCS students on a third. The two activities we are developing are both utilising augmented reality to bring the park to life. The first is a learning activity that augments video-based material over a static information board near the parks water feature.


The scenario is:

A park visitor has been and visited the information point and see the advertising material mentioning the hidden digital materials around the park, they have downloaded the required app to their smartphone.

They have walked to the water feature and looked at the information board, explaining some of the features of the pond, and what creatures they might see. They have noticed the icon on the board that indicates there is more to find out. They load the app on their smartphone and then they view the board on their phones screen.

The board then comes to life, with a video displaying over the board, and the video asks them if they would like to participate in a quick quiz. The person then touches the ‘yes’ button their phone screen. The video then displays some information and asks them a question about what they have just heard. Buttons appear on the screen and they can then choose an answer. The video will then tell them the if they are correct, and it will ask if they would like further information.

The second activity we are working on is a GPS based ‘Tree Trail’, where park visitors will be able to use their smart devices to view the park and find out about the trees and features around the park. If the visitor has the app open when they walk near one of these features they will be alerted by an audio introduction, when they can then find out more information.

Ipswich Borough Council are using a drone to video fly-throughs of the park. With the drone taking off and filming along the paths, these videos will be used to augment over another one of the information boards. Drones an area of interest to us as we believe they have great potential in other areas of working with the UCS Heritage team.

One thing we need to be careful of with the use of all this technology in an open space is, mobile signal and its strength. The new information point and cafe that are in the newly refurbished stables will have free wifi. We have spoken with the project manager about how they might extend this into the park. Extending the wifi is an option, but not one that will be 100% successful, to this end we undertook a mobile phone signal survey all around the park. Signal strength and speed tests were run at all points of interest in the park. These results were very encouraging as the area is now covered by 4G by two of the major operators, the others offered a fast 3G services.

Mobile phone signal survey

We are very exciting to be working with Ipswich Borough Council on such an innovative project and we will update this blog over the coming weeks and months.

Graphics Design and AR

The Elevate Team were asked to speak to a group of level 5 Graphic Design students who are currently working through their 'Interactive Screen Design' module.

The idea was to introduce the students to augmented reality, most had heard the term, but very few had seen or used it.  +Aaron Burrell  and +David Mullett led the session, from what the Elevate team do and why, to the earliest thoughts of AR and the early 1950s inventions from Morton Helig.  All the way through to the work that the Elevate Team are doing, and what might come next.

The students were very engaged and one student in particular had already been thinking of using this technology in his project.

As well as looking at augmented reality, the students were also introduced to virtual reality and the idea of the Oculus Rift.  An area that Aaron believes will grow is the blurring of the lines between AR and VR, if the ability to connect a camera to a VR headset, allowing camera's view to be layered within the VR world.

To show an example of the VR headsets the students were shown how this can be done at a low cost, starter level with a head mounted smartphone holder (as seen below).

The team left the students very enthused and are hoping to return to speak with the students again soon.

Below is the slides from the session:

The 'Open' Augmented Web

In a recent blog post titled 'Getting Started with Augmented Reality in Education' I mentioned in my conclusion that one hope would be for an open standard.

I have read with great interest about the work that BuildAR are doing with their titled "Augmented Web".  BuildAR have been developing an open standards AR system, this means that you can embed AR into your website and use most new devices with the latest browsers on to access the AR material, rather than needing to download a specific app.  The browser also has no need for any plugins.

BuildAR says:

• It's based on open web standards
• It's built upon our open source awe.js library
• It can support a wider range of 3D models
• It can support a wider range of special effects
• It can support 3D/spatialised audio
• And best of all you can add it to your existing website

Below is an example of marker tracking running in standard production Chrome browser on a Nexus 4.

It's clear that in some ways, the Augmented Web is now where Mobile AR was back in 2010 and it's currently accelerating at an amazing pace. When you look at the interactivity and 3D capabilities, it's already equal to and in some cases beyond today's proprietary Mobile AR browsers. Furthermore, the fact that it runs in mainstream web browsers means it will rapidly be available to a much larger audience than proprietary Mobile AR ever was.

This development has huge potential and as BuidAR mention in the quote above there is a much larger available audience for AR content in an open web browser.

One current issue is for Apple users and the fact that Apple currently don't support the open WebGL standard that this new system.  There is growing need for open standards and the inclusion of WebGL on Apple devices.

Exciting times ahead, I will keep this blog updated of further developments.