ARLearn is a toolkit for mobile field trips and (serious) games. The ANDROID app is already for some weeks available via Google Play. It has been successfully piloted with cultural science students in Florence and an ARLearn security simulation has been organised with employees of UNHCR.
Till now ARLearn content creation was cumbersome. Apart from manually crafting JSON encoded game files, there was no convenient way to create an ARLearn game. Today we're releasing a functional authoring tool for ARLearn. Admitted, the tool is not perfect yet but it greatly speeds up the time necessary to create a game. Furthermore, this tool supports monitoring the progress of the different users. By creating a game run, games can be played with real users.
The following video shows how to get started with the ARLearn authoring tool.
Try this yourself at http://streetlearn.appspot.com/Authoring.html and download the ARLearn android app. This release of the authoring tool features
- Four kinds of media objects: narrative objects, multiple choice questions, videos and audio objects.
- Map based (re)positioning of media items
- A powerful notification framework. Modifications to runs or games are made available real time to the android app.
- Support for downloading games and runs to your computer, so that they can be reused.
Other features that are supported by ARLearn, but have not yet made it to the authoring tool include
- Dependencies. Through dependencies media objects are linked. For instance, feedback objects can be bound to actions such as giving an answer.
- Radius triggers to make media visible only when the user is near to an object.
- Manual triggers that enable the operator to make items appear or disappear.
- Other media objects like pickup items or zones where items can be dropped.
