ALT-C presentation of Geological Serious Game

On wednesday 9th Sept.. Myself and Jacqueline Houghton from the Earth Sciences Dept, Leeds University - presented at ALT-C ( Association for Learning Technology ) Conference hosted at Manchester University for this year.

The session was our first opportunity to disseminate the project outside of our respective Geology and Arts circles to a Education / Learning Technologists Conference. We were on the OER track - as the Virtual Mapping project is freely accessible for other organisations to use. During the day, we were informed that Durham University had started using it in some of their teaching sessions, Woo hoo!

---> Link to project here <---

The session was well attended, especially against the range of other parallel sessions going on. Feedback was positive. Some questions of student engagement with a game, that might not have visual par with a Game Console; so far the students using it have not seen this as a barrier to engagement. Some discussion on DEM data of real places - though our's is bespoke - rather than using a real place. Particularly strong discussion after the session with several people with keen interest in the area of gamification and games for education - many highlighting the application of knowledge by keeping the paper based element present. Some referencing Second Life as a historical point of reference as well, when dealing with virtual spaces as field trip simulation.

During the day there was some excellent workshops and sessions - a particularly standout was the presentation from Leeds College of Music's Ruth Clark and Craig Golding using AR with Sound Mixing Desks - http://www.lcm.ac.uk/why-leeds-college-of-music/elearning

Also interesting to see outcomes of Google Glass investigation by Edinburgh University - particularly engaging students in coming up with ideas and content using this type of technology.