Using Alternate Reality Games in language education

[Joel Josephson]

r.e. European Union funded education project

ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0 (ARGuing) is a European Union education project.

The project has created the first use of an Alternate Reality Game for motivating secondary school students to learn languages. The project has also learnt how an ARG can be adapted to almost any area of education.

The game that was created was called ' The Tower of Babel' and included a story designed to engage the target student group. The students had to save the planet by completing specific quests, collaboratively and internationally. The project has been a huge success with over 400 teachers and students from 17 countries playing the game ' The Tower of Babel'. In the final pilot over 9,000 quests were answered and 800 files uploaded.

The project has created a number of resources that are available online, these include:
3. A re-usable game platform (on a Moodle platform) that includes multiple languages http://ictthatworks.net:8080/moodle/ - you can view inside the platform by sending an email to me. Please place in the subject line of the email – TofB platform
4. A project website with additional information http://www.arg-education.eu . On the website are papers to download including:
a. A methodology to make and use Alternate Reality Games in education
b. A set of case studies of other ARGs and serious games with empirical evidence of results
c. A set of use case scenarios that show examples of how ARGs could be used for other subjects or cross-subjects
d. An online teacher training course to enable educators to use the ARG the project produced
e. Summaries of papers on the pedagogy, evaluation and the technology employed. (full papers are available in the conference proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning http://academic-conferences.org/ecgbl/ecgbl2009/ecgbl09-proceedings.htm )

The project team are also offering consultancy services to other educators interested in using ARGs in education.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

Prof. Thomas Connolly
Coordinator ARGuing EU project
University of The West of Scotland
[e-mail]
http://www.arg-education.eu/