Savannah

The prototype consists of two related arenas of activity. In the first, children have to survive ?as lions? outside in a playing field, interacting with a virtual savannah and exploring the opportunities and risks to lions in that space. Children are given GPS-linked PDAs through which they ?see?, ?hear? and ?smell? the world of the savannah as they navigate the real space outdoors as a pride of lions. The second domain, the ?den?, is an indoors space where children can plan, research and reflect on their outdoor game-play through accessing resources such as the internet, books, adult experts and an interface that has tracked their outdoors activities.

The experience lasts over a three-hour period in which children are set an overall challenge (to survive as lions in the savannah over the course of a year) within which there are three levels: 1) to claim territory through scenting; 2) to hunt successfully in the wet season; 3) to survive hunger and thirst in the dry season. The children are placed firmly in the driving seat: on completion of each level of the game outside, they return inside to the den to review their success on an interactive whiteboard that has tracked all of their movements; they then decide whether to repeat the level, having conducted further research and planning, or to go on to the next level. —Savannah (Nesta Future Lab)

A game where kids use wireless PDAs to help them pretend to be lions. The kids actually run around outside in a field, and I guess the PDA and headphones help map the simulation overtop their real-world rompting.

Whoops — I actually mistyped romping as “rompting”, which makes me think of “prompting”. Does that matter? Probably not, but hey… as long as I was already blogging, why not throw that in, too?

Via Barbara Ganley.