As technology has become cheaper, and hence more widespread, there has been increasing interest in bringing it into the classroom. The aim of doing this has been not only to teach about technology but also to make use of technology in teaching. Despite all the money that has been spent, this use of technology does not appear to have been very successful in improving education. There seem to be two reasons for this. First of all, there is the issue of accessibility. Typically computers are not really in the classroom at all, they are in some other space (for perfectly good reasons like ease of maintenance and ensuring that there are enough computers for every student in a class to use one), and this makes them hard to use in the usual kind of timetable. By the time a class has gathered itself, got to the computer room and started up the machines, there is little time to work before everything has to be shutdown and the students head out to the next class. Second, there is the issue of content. Typical educational software tries to exploit the tremendous appetite for computer games, assuming that since students are happy to spend hours every day playing games that involve chasing and shooting things, then they will be equally engaged in games that involve doing arithmetic and solving word puzzles. Sadly, such games exhibit little of the subtlety—need for lateral thinking, transfer learning, and group interaction — that modern videogames, and those who play them, take for granted.

To deal with these problems, Eric Klopper’s group at the MIT Media Lab have been developing educational games on handheld devices, and these games are the subject of Augmented Learning. The use of handheld devices solves the accessibility problem since such devices — they concentrate on the Palm and the Pocket PC (sadly ignoring the Nintendo DS, despite its prominent place both on the cover and in the handheld market) — are cheap enough that they can really be housed in every classroom. Despite the hardware and software limitations of such platforms, they can be used to provide much more engaging games than is typical of educational software, and indeed possibly than can be provided for desktop machines.

The key is that handhelds are mobile, and this mobility can be used to stimulate interactionFootnote 1. As an example, consider the game ‘Live Long and Prosper’ developed by Klopper’s group. In this game, students have to grow a long-living organism, breeding individuals by beaming data between different handhelds. To breed, students have to physically move around the classroom, and identifying the desirable traits quickly leads to discussions about the role of different genes, discussions that would be much harder to get started without the mechanism of the game to carry forward student interest. (This shows another key difference between Klopper’s games and more traditional ones — the former do not try to teach, instead they support the students in learning from each other.)

Mobility is even more important in the game ‘Environmental Detectives’, also described in Augmented Learning. Here the information provided to students is location-dependent, with location information being provided by GPS. Students have to move to particular locations in order to ‘meet’ with specific artificial characters, and to take specific actions (like obtaining samples or having the samples analyzed). More complex kinds of interaction are also possible. In ‘Outbreak @ the Institute’, for example, operations can be carried out on other players, and those operations vary from location to location, so groups of players need to closely coordinate their movements in order to progress in the game.

As yet there is no real evidence that this approach to educational games will be any more successful than the traditional one — there is plenty of anecdotal evidence but Klopper’s games have not been used widely enough to gather significant data. However, the approach seems to me to have a lot more going for it than the traditional one. Not only does it bring the notion of educational games up to date in its encouragement of interaction but it also is also a big step towards student-centered learning, providing a structure around which students can seek out information for themselves, discover new ideas, and engage in critical thinking and dialogue. This form of teaching is one that the evidence shows to be more effective than the more usual ‘push’ techniques, and encourages the development of transferable skills. As a result, I think we will see much more augmented learning in school and university classrooms and hear much more about Augmented Learning.