Monday, 8 April 2013

Educational Ingress?

Yesterday I was involved (a small bit, I was there at least :D) in the creation of what I have been told is the largest field created in Australia in terms of mind units (over 1050000) in Google's augmented reality game Ingress. I originally signed up for Ingress after my brother explained it to me, but my reasoning was not necessarily to just play the game, I also wanted to see how I might be able to apply some of the principles of the game to my school, to create some sort of massive RPG that covered all 'interested' students at my school.

After being involved in yesterdays mega field project I am even more interested in getting something like this working in my school. I had not met any of the 'team' that came to my home town to help create the field, but we spent an enjoyable 2 hours together. More importantly to me was the teamwork, leadership, problem solving and communication skills that I saw in action. This is the reason I want this in my school, just by playing 'a game' students at my school could develop all of these skills, outside of class time, and 'want' to do it.

Why did the mega field get created, because we could, there were 5 teams of players over 2 days. One agent took the lead and organised the timing so that the opposing team would not know what was going on. Three teams on the day went to different locations ready to create the massive triangular field, an additional team actually went somewhere to create a distraction. The fifth team put in the hard yards the day prior helping some of our players get experience and level up.

So the field only stayed up for about 2 hours, but I can tell you the feeling when a good portion of Victoria was covered with this field was palpable in my group. I really think that this is an amazing game, and with a bit of tweaking for education it could make an amazing addition to schools and help improve so many skills of our youth.


Victoria before
and after. (A big thanks to agent ozmusic for co-ordinating and for taking the screen caps.)

As always thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment below.
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2 comments:

  1. Annabel18 April 2013 at 13:59

    Hi Stephen
    I am a secondary teacher in Adelaide and I have been reading about your Minecraft experiences for a while. Very inspiring! I am VERY keen to get Minecraftedu up and running at my school, but I have no gaming experience at all. I have just purchased a single license of Minecraftedu so I can start playing so that I have some idea about what I'm doing! My problem is that the tech support department in my school keep blocking any attempts I make to get this up and running. Their excuses are 'it takes up too much room on our server' and 'we have to buy a new server to run it and it's too expensive'. I was wondering how your server is set up in your school and what costs were involved. If my students are signed up through Minecraftedu do they play on my school server or is there some remote Minecraftedt server that they link to? You can see them I'm not a 'tech-head"!! My email address is: annabel.dalzell7@schools.sa.edu.au
    Many thanks
    Annabel

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  2. Kingerz14 November 2014 at 12:47

    We've used Ingress a lot for extra-curricular activities at our College in Australia. The full write-up is here:

    http://kingerzexperience.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/the-ingress-at-eltham-project.html

    We'd love to hear from others using the app in an educational setting.

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