Lisa Jacka

Can we ‘Catch ‘em All’? An exploration of the nexus between augmented reality games, urban planning and urban design

ABSTRACT Urban planners and designers have spent the last 50 years trying to activate unused public spaces, create walkable cities and encourage sociability through urban design. Pokémon Go has succeeded, almost overnight, to entice people of all demographics into the streets of cities around the world. In fact, many previously underutilized public spaces have suddenly become hot spots for all demographics, playing Pokémon Go and other similar augmented reality games (ARGs). While anecdotally it seems that ARGs activate public spaces, increase community interactions and facilitate exploration of urban spaces, little study has been done on the influence of ARGs on sense of place, or the way in which these games are influencing player engagement with the public spaces they are playing within. This paper reports the findings of a survey of 994 Australian players. The paper explores whether ARGs affect user needs being met in public spaces, and the implications of these findings for urban practitioners.

Students as Designers of Virtual World Learning Environments

Many young people now access digital networks that include individuals very unlike them who promote different cultural, religious and ethical value systems and behaviour. Such value systems can create conflicts of expectation for young people seeking to resolve their relationship to a national citizenship in a pluralistic society, especially if they are experiencing adolescent uncertainties or a growing awareness of social inequalities. The emergence of trans-national political structures and their differing value systems, together with the rise of international tensions, have increased uncertainty about the nature of identity and entitlement to a national citizenship. This paper describes the ongoing Citizens project study of identity development in young people, using real-world scenarios to discover the values that underpin their engagement with this wider range of religious and cultural value systems and to explore personal identity, political issues and citizenship.Virtual worlds provide pre-service teachers with the opportunity to study teaching and learning in an immersive 3D computer based environment. The pre-service teacher is able to become a designer of learning environments in ways that were previously impossible in a traditional bricks and mortar classroom. The learning environment that pre-service teachers create can, in turn, inform established educators about the usefulness of virtual worlds for education. In the School of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia, pre-service teachers have been given the opportunity to design and build virtual world learning environments. This chapter presents the story of one pre-service teacher and her tutor as they discuss the design of a virtual world learning environment for maths. This particular design project resulted in virtual worlds being integrated across a number of pre-service teacher courses and extended into the K-6 classroom. An overview of these other projects is also presented.

Anticipating Engagement: Pre-service Teachers’ Perceptions of Virtual Worlds

The need to engage students has become a significant driver in how courses are designed and delivered in both universities and K-12 schools. Virtual worlds are a technology that is promoted as highly engaging and as such require our attention. At a regional university in NSW, students in the Bachelor of Education (Secondary) were introduced to new ways to conceptualise their future classrooms with an emphasis on emerging pedagogies and ICTs, including virtual worlds. A mixed methods data analysis was applied to 311 blog posts, gathered over a three-year period, to ascertain the students’ perceptions of virtual worlds. Significantly, 45% of all posts mentioned perceived engagement with virtual worlds by children as a reason to utilise virtual worlds in the classroom. However, the perception of engagement did not always correspond to the students’ perception that the virtual world would be effective in the classroom due to a number of barriers to implementation. Analysis of the student responses also highlighted the perceived connection between engagement and the creative aspects of virtual worlds. This research has implications for the design of pre-service teacher education with ICTs, more generally, and strategies for learning design that responds to the integration of ICTs such as virtual worlds now and in the future. These implications are also tentatively transferable to educators in general, not just pre-service teachers.