Exploring risk through pervasive gaming

By Andrés Monroy-Hernández

MIT Media Laboratory

T540: Cognition and the Art and Science of Instruction

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Professor Tina Grotzer

This is project is not for the TE Specialization but uses technology and is not part

of another class.
Overall purpose

The goal of this project is to foster the understanding of risk by creating

and participating in pervasive games. Special focus will be directed towards risk

in the context of complex causality, such as the risk in virus-like phenomena.

As our society becomes more interconnected in the physical and digital

realm, complex phenomena have become common place. From viral marketing

to the avian flu virus, the understanding of risk within this context is important for

the full participation of individuals in society.

In the spirit of the Participatory Simulations (Colella, 1998) and the

Environmental Detectives (Klopfer, 2002) this project exposes learners to the

understanding objectives through games that take in the physical world. Inspired

by Constructionist philosophy (Papert, 1980), I try to go a step further by

encouraging participants to design their own games. This paper is a description

of the following:

• A two day workshop where middle-school students create and participate

in pervasive games that explore the topic of risk assessment. The

overarching goal of the activities is to promote the transfer of knowledge

through the exploration of structurally similar phenomena.

• The technical design and proof-of-concept prototype of the system where

the pervasive games will take place.

Understanding goals

Based on the research literature (Grotzer, 2005) there are core issues

involved in the perception of risk in complex phenomena. This project tries to

tackle these issues while promoting the use of iterative design.

1. Question: How can we find the hidden (or non-obvious) causes of an

infection1? Statement: Students will understand and appreciate:

• that risk can stem from unexpected causes

• that it is important to question assumptions

2. Question: Can an infection be caused by something far away or that

happened sometime in the past? Statement: Students will understand and

appreciate:

• that causes do not have to be in temporal and spatial proximity. For

example, there are theories that explain active hurricane seasons

as caused by an increase in water temperature in the arctic.

3. Question: Can an infection have multiple unrelated causes? Statement:

Students will understand and appreciate:

• that a centralized mindset is not always useful when analyzing

complex causality. For example, most people tend to think that

traffic jams are caused by a single event such as an accident or a

construction site, but oftentimes it is caused by the small

1
The word infection is used to refer to any type of phenomenon that exhibits virus-like

properties.
 decentralized relationships between cars such as differences in

speed.

4. Question: Can we tell how risky something is? Statement: Students will

understand and appreciate:

• that when confronted with risk it is helpful to model it in a

quantitative and/or qualitative way, instead of viewing it as a

dichotomy (i.e. risky vs. not risky)

5. Question: What is the value of creating a model of a system and

redesigning it a few times? Statement: Students will understand and

appreciate:

• that model-building skills are helpful to convey and understand an

idea

• that iterative design is a useful skill

It is important to note that the goal of this intervention is not to present risk as

something to be avoided at all costs. After all we would not have learned how to

ride a bike if it was not for our ability to take risks.

Analysis of learning challenges

Most of the understanding goals described before were selected based on

what research has identified as being challenging features of understanding risk

in the context of complex causality. Therefore, the learning challenges and goals

in this project have an almost one to one relationship.

1. Tendency to attend to only obvious causes. When assessing risk there are

multiple factors that can come into play to determine how risky something
 is. Research shows (Driver and Warrington, 1985) that often times

people’s explanations focus more on those “perceptually obvious” than

those less noticeable causes.

2. A centralized mindset is common in most children and even adults. The

idea of decentralized systems is not new, yet, most of us grow in a world

where the centralized mindset is prevalent. Assessing risk with a

decentralized mindset is powerful, however, it is challenging not only for

children but for all people. Leiser (1983) exemplifies it when writing about

children’s conception of Economics: “The child finds it easier to refer

unexplained phenomena to the deliberate actions of a clearly defined

entity, such as the government, than to impersonal ‘market forces’.”

3. Great difficulty is shown in understanding causes that involve probability.

Research shows that children can think in probabilistic terms, but they

greater difficulty in thinking about probabilistic causes (Kalish, 1998).

4. Time delays and distance can prevent people from seeing a causal

relationship (Grotzer & Bell, 1999). Credit assignment is one of the pillars

of learning (Minsky, in print), but sometimes it is very challenging to

identify the causes of an event due to the difference in time or distance

between cause and effect. For example, is global warming related to

something that is happening in a different location?

Structure of Intervention

“Riskland”

If you wanted to really learn French, you cannot do better than living in

France for a while (Papert, 1980). With this idea in mind, the Logo programming

language was invented as way to give children the ability to live in 'Mathland' – a

computer environment where Mathematics must be learned in order to play,

explore and prosper.

Using this powerful notion of full immersion, this project tries to create a

microworld where in order to play, explore and prosper, one must learn about

risk. “Riskland” takes the form of a pervasive game where the learning goal is to

let participants be fully immersed in a virtual world where the understanding of

risk is necessary to succeed.

The game

The objective of the game is to earn points by collecting items scattered

around certain location (school, neighborhood or city). Participants are split into

teams and teammates are encouraged to help each other. The winning team is

the one that gets the highest score by the end of the session, which is not

necessarily the one that collects the most number of items. In order to emphasize

the collaborative nature of the game, only the team’s scores are published for

everyone to see. The personal scores are private by default.

Participants carry cell phones with them that, using cell phone tower IDs,

the system can determine the zone in which the participant is located. Given this
location, the cell phone presents the user with a list of possible items to be found

in that area with a description and picture of the specific location given as clues.

Fig 1. Cell phone application with location awareness.

The items to be collected are physical annotations embodied in

Semacode2 tags. Inspired by the use of Semacodes in the Semapedia project

(Rondeau & Wiechers, 2005), these paper tags are attached to physical spaces

such as walls, doors, etcetera. This how a Semacode looks like this:

2
Semacode is a trade name for machine-readable two-dimensional black and white

symbols that act as "barcode URLs." It is primarily aimed at being used with cellular phones with

cameras. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semacode)
Fig. 2. Example of Semacode printed on paper (Semapedia)

The tag itself only needs to have the Semacode, anything else printed on

the tag is for decoration purposes or to explain to people not participating in the

game what the tags are about.

When a participant finds an item he or she he uses a camera phone to

read the tag and record the finding into the system. Just for finding the item, the

participant’s team gets one additional point.

Fig 3. Participant finding Semacode in the street uses the Semacode reader (Semapedia, Semacode).
 Once recording the finding and its corresponding point, the participant will

be presented with the choice of getting an additional reward that comes with the

risk of a penalty. The participants are presented with information that will help

them make the decision of whether or not the reward is worth the risk of the

negative consequence.

Rewards can be:

- Points ranging from 1 to 10.

- Ability to get double or triple points in the

future collections.

- Ability to get additional points if participant

engages in an interaction with another

teammate. Interactions consist of getting in

physical proximity with a teammate and

connect both cell phones via Bluetooth3.

Fig. 4. Users exchanging information

via Bluetooth (Corbis)

Penalties can be:

- Item collection disabled for certain period of time or in certain location.

- Item collection hindered by cutting in half or third future points collections.

3
Bluetooth provides a way to connect and exchange information between devices like

personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, laptops, PCs, printers and digital cameras via

a secure, low-cost, globally available short range radio frequency.

 Awards and penalties are explicitly described as well as the percentage of

risk associated with it. For example, a screen could have a statement like this:

Fig. 5. Proof of concept application

Penalties can affect the individual that found it or they can spread to

others when interacting with them. The spreading of penalties depends on:

- The penalty. Some penalties cannot be spread

- The interaction with other players, mainly teammates.

- The interaction with the items. Some penalties can be transported from

one item to another.

The game changes as participants interact with items and with each other,

giving it dynamism and the ability to frame each activity to convey specific

understanding goals. All activities are recorded by the system.

 The activities

During the workshop, participants first play a predefined game and later

customize their own game by placing Semacode tags in physical locations and

registering them into the system using their cell phones. When the registration

takes place, the participant has the ability to choose a reward and penality from a

menu.

Fig. 6. Participat pasting printed Semacode in a physical location (Semapedia)

During the game, participants are expected to confront the understanding

goals when trying to make sense of the game as players and designers.

Debriefing sessions will consist of discussion and reflection on the activities as

well as through experiments that will lead students to make analogies of the

abstract underlying structure of the game with similar scenarios from real life.

Facilitators will encourage learning by analogies and will use those analogies to

confront students with their naïve assumptions about their experiences in other

settings.
 Workshop

The activity will be a two day workshop that will follow a structure like this:

• Day 1

o 9:00 AM. Give students an overview of the day’s activities and

overall goals. For example:

ƒ “Welcome everyone, today we are going to learn about risk.

We will learn new ways of thinking about risk and its causes.

We are going to do this by playing some games. How many

of you like games? What type of games? Video games?

Well, today we are going to play a game using your cell

phones, it is part video game and part real-world game.

We’ll be walking, talking and having fun. The first half of the

day we will… and then we will finish by doing…. Ok?”

o 9:15 AM. Introduction. Students will be asked to thinking about their

current understanding of risk. This will also help facilitators get an

idea of what are the preconceptions students bring with them.

Sample questions to direct the conversation:

ƒ Can you give me examples of situations where you have

encountered risk?

ƒ How do you decide whether or not to take risk?

ƒ How does your perception of risk is affected by how big or

small the consequences are? (Extent of consequence)

 ƒ Do you think risk is related to luck? (Deterministic vs.

probabilistic)

ƒ Can you always tell when something involves risk? Can you

remember any situation when you or someone else did

something and later found unforeseen consequences? (Non-

obviousness)

o 10:00 AM. Describe purpose of the game and split students into

two groups. Let them choose a name for their team.

o 10:30 AM. First game takes place to get students accustomed to

the system and experience the concepts in real life. This section

appeals to those learners that enjoy playing games and

manipulating toys, like in the case of Montessori learning objects

(Zuckerman, in preparation)

o 11:30 AM. Everybody gets together to have a brief discussion of

the experience. Sample questions for the discussion:

ƒ What strategies did you use while playing the game?

ƒ What made you take the risk of going after a reward? How

did you come up with that conclusion?

ƒ Did you encounter a situation where you didn’t know why

you got less or more points than you thought? Why do you

think that happened?

o 12:30 PM. The winning team is announced.

o 12:40 PM Lunch break.

o 1:00 PM. Facilitators explain that now it is time for them to design

their own game by hiding items and assigning them rewards and

penalties. They are informed that the game they are designing will

be played by the other team. The learning objective for the design

of customized games is mainly to foster a deeper understanding of

risk concepts because creative design is one of the cognitive tasks

that promote development of analogies (Ganter et al, 2001)

Students should accomplish a higher level of mastery in the

understanding of the game and risk itself. Through the design of

their own games students will think about how to challenge the

other players by thinking about making clever combinations of

award-penalty pairs that use some of the learning challenges

themselves.

o 1:30 PM. Groups go and design their game. This resonates with

learners more inclined to learning by design and construction.

(Zuckerman, in preparation). Facilitators need to make sure that the

level of difficulty is maintained within reasonable standards. The

parameters to be observed are:

ƒ Location of items. Make sure they are not in dangerous or

inaccessible locations.

ƒ The points awarded should correspond to the risk and the

penalty. For example, a reward of 1 extra point with a 99%

risk of loosing 10 points might not be the best arrangement.

 The facilitator should point out this, but the students

themselves should think about this and making the final

decisions.

o 2:30 PM. Everyone gets together again. Facilitators indicate that

new each group can play each others game.

o 3:30 PM. Time is up. Discussion of experiences guided by

questions from the facilitators. These questions should lead

students to:

ƒ Answer any questions they had about the structure of the

game.

ƒ Make analogies of their experience with real-world

phenomena. Leveraging the power of analogical reasoning

(Gillespie, 1999).

ƒ Think about their strategies and ways of thinking while they

were playing the game.

ƒ Sample questions:

• Let’s list all the types of risk/rewards you experienced

and the strategies that we can use to make a

decision.

• If you could name the strategies you used, how would

you name them?

• Can you think of examples in the real life where you

have encountered similar decision making situations?

 Did you act the same way as in the game? If not,

why?

• How is the game similar to real life? How is it

different?

• What type of penalties did you use when designing

your game? Which ones do you think are the most

challenging for other players and why?

• How did creating the game help you see the different

things to look for when assessing risk? What

elements of the game do not apply to real life?

• In what scenarios do you think similar strategies to

the ones used in the game might or might not work in

real life? Why?

• How would you advise others to act on similar

situations?

• Do others team members affect your decision

making? Would you have done the same if you were

playing by yourself? Does the same happen to you in

real life?

o 4:30 PM. Facilitators indicate that students can stay to discuss with

their teammates ways to improve their game design and playing

strategies for the next day session. This initiates the first iteration of

the design of their game. Facilitators should help teams in the

 design of their games based on the different strategies and

challenges that came up during the discussion, which should

resemble the concepts listed in the understanding goals.

• Day 2

o 9:00 AM. Welcoming to day two. Facilitators present the goals and

schedule for the day.

o 9:30 AM. Students continue in the improvement of their game and

creation of strategies.

o 10:30 AM. Groups play each others game. It is assumed that the

difficulty of the game is higher as well as their skills for playing the

game.

o 11:30 AM. Everyone gets together and a winning team is

announced. Teams start working on a poster that summarizes their

experiences and strategies on how to approach the game and the

applications of the skills in other risk assessment activities.

Facilitators should help students in defining the structural elements

of the posters which ideally should include:

ƒ Lists of social and natural phenomena that share

characteristics with the game, specifying the differences as

well.

ƒ Mind maps on all the concepts touched upon the activities.

ƒ Workflows on different strategies used during the game and

noting how they can be applied in real life.

 o 12:00 PM. Lunch break.

o 1:00 PM. Poster creation continues.

o 2:00 PM. Poster presentation takes place. Facilitators lead the

discussion and wrap up by giving a didactic presentation that

encapsulates the understanding goals. Each team has 20 minutes

to present their poster and defend their ideas. The organizers

should highlight those concepts presented by the students that

match the understanding goals.

o 3:00 P M. Group assessment takes place. The questions should be

very similar to the assessment done the first day, but giving more

emphasis to what was experienced in the games

o 4:00 PM. Ends.

The discussion session is perhaps one of the most important moments of

the workshop because it is the main opportunity to foster high-road transfer. The

facilitator should encourage students to challenge what is presented and

question each other their understanding (Feltovich, 1993). Questions should lead

to the description of the general structure of the game and then the facilitator

should point out explicitly the general features of the activity (Perkins and

Salomon, 1988). Some of the questions should lead to the finding of similarities

between the models presented in the activity and other phenomena students

know, for example:

ƒ Diseases

ƒ Rumors
 ƒ Sexual education

ƒ Smoking

ƒ Pollution

Justification for the Design

There is a long tradition of games in the style of what here is proposed.

Examples of this are scavenger and treasure hunts and more recently

Geocaching (Peters, 2004). Geocaching, is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in

which participants (called "geocachers") use a Global Positioning System

receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called

"geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small

waterproof container containing a logbook and "treasure" (usually toys or trinkets

of little monetary value). Some variations of the game include a point system to

enhance game play (Wikipedia). At the same time, these types of hunting games

have been mentioned by educators (Lary, 2004) as a valuable tool in educational

environment. Similarly, successful implementations of pervasive games for

education can be exemplified by the game Savannah (Benford et al, 2004) where

kids play at being lions by navigating in augmented environments with mobile

handheld devices. Nevertheless, the idea of letting people not just participate, but

also create their own games has not been widely explored. Through the design

of their own games, learners will take the active roll of creators not just

consumers of ideas. The creative design process is a cognitive task where

analogy development is manifested (Gentner et al,2001). The hope is that the

creations of analogies will occur and if it does, research shows that it can have a

very positive impact on learning.

1. One of the goals of the activities in this project is to appeal to a wide range

of people, something that Resnick and Silverman (2005) call “wide walls”.

This also reflects the multiple intelligence theory set forth by Gardner

(1980). Given that framework we could map several intelligence types to

aspects of the game:

• Logical/mathematical. Coming up with a strategy for finding of items

and assessing risk in a quantitatively way

• Verbal/linguistic. Describing activities during the discussion and

poster presentation.

• Visual/spatial. Creating a mental image of the physical locations

where the game takes place.

• Bodily/kinesthetic. The activities involve walking and moving around

in a physical location looking for the hidden items.

• Interpersonal. Socialization is part of the team organization. Also,

having mental models of other players help make the game more

challenging during the design phase.

• Intrapersonal. Individual exploration and planning occurs during the

game.

2. Learners have the opportunity to confront these challenges while playing

two roles: designer and participant. While playing the game, the

understanding challenges are actually part of the game challenges,

 fostering the understanding of the core ideas. Similarly to learning

analytical skills while playing chess. When the learners play the role of

designers, they have the opportunity to customize the game by placing

challenging obstacles that relate to the learning challenges as well. As

opposed to other game design tools that give a lot of freedom, in this case

the tool will give less freedom as to what options are available, giving

more emphasis to the understanding of the core concepts rather than the

game building itself. One can think of this design tool as a MS Word

Template where we can only change the content but the framework is

created for us.

3. The abstract nature of the game would allow for the use of multiple

analogies rather than being stuck to a specific example. All the

discussions should always link back to specific examples. This feature is

aimed at fostering transfer. The activities are abstract on purpose to

avoiding low-road transfer by attempting to emphasize deep structures

rather than surface features (Feltovitch et al, 1993). Ideally this will lead to

a high-road transfer (Perkins D.N. &Salomon, G, 1988) to a diverse

number of fields presented during the discussion session.

4. Facilitators end the sessions with a group discussion and reflection of the

events of the game that try to encourage the use of the metacognitive

layers through Socratic-like questioning. For example, one of the

metacognitive layers relates to the evaluation of the type of thinking

learners do, this is approached through suggested questions such as “In

 what scenarios do you think similar strategies to the ones used in the

game might or might not work in real life? Why?”. Learners have the

opportunity to confront these challenges while playing two roles: designer

and participant. While playing the game, the understanding challenges are

actually part of the game challenges, fostering the understanding of the

core ideas. Similarly to learning analytical skills while playing chess. When

the learners play the role of designers, they have the opportunity to

customize the game by placing challenging obstacles that relate to the

learning challenges as well.

5. In the spirit of Constructivism, one of the goals of this project is to engage

students in the creative design of a game, not only to foster the model-

building skills but because “research has shown that the process of

creating models (as opposed to simply using models built by someone

else) helps develop a greater understanding of the concepts embedded in

the models” (Colella 2001).

6. Collaborative learning. Given the structure of activities it is expected to

foster collaboration.

7. Engagement. The activities should be fun for everyone. Participants in

previous similar activities have proven to be very engaging. This is what

an educator found in a Geocaching activity: “The kids were excited (as

were the parent volunteers who, in one case, had to be restrained!), and

two of them even mailed me thank you notes after the camp was over.
 How often do students actually thank you for teaching them something?”

(Leary, 2005)

Critique of the design

Perhaps this project is too ambitious at trying to accomplish the

understanding of risk while also showing how to create a game. There were two

reasons why I decided to go this way. The first is that in my personal experience

the deepest learning experiences occur when I am building something rather

than being just an observer. The second is that the creative design functionality

has not been widely explored in the realm of pervasive gaming. I think running a

mini version of this workshop with other graduate students could give me a better

idea of how successful this could be and what changes can be made, perhaps

the creation of games should only be introduced in a longer workshop.

Given my limited experience in teaching it is hard to predict how the

sessions would be carried out, this has made the facilitator’s instructions lack

more detailed definition. This, again, can be improved by running a mini

workshop where I would get better sense of how the script of a session would

look like. The same critique applies to the description of the posters.

In terms of the technology, one of the biggest challenges is the User

Interface given the space limitations of the cell phone. The goal will be to opt for

simpler interfaces even at the cost of attractiveness.

There is certainly a lot of work needed to be done before this can be

implemented in a school setting, but I think this paper help me shed a light on

those issues to be on the look out for. In the next weeks the focus will be on the
creation of the simplest version of both: the activities and the technology, leaving

aside the ability to design customized games. This will give me a product that I

can test in a lab environment and from which I can get more feedback from

experts. I expect to have multiple iterations of the same process until I have a

more refined version of this project.

Prototype

The initial idea is to implement the items as printed Semacode tags

(similar to those used by semapedia.org). Using cell phones with location based

services (Java API LBS JSR 1.79) the phone will tell the user where to look for

items and some clues. Once the user finds the item, it will use the camera phone

to retrieve the information from the Semacode.

The prototype is composed of a J2ME Semacode reader application that

utilizes Location Based Services and/or cell tower ID. The application assumes

the availability of camera features on the phone and data access to connect to

the server where the index of Semacodes and their reward/penalty information is

stored.

This project capitalizes on existing technology developed at the MIT and in

other places that would make it feasible to scale this to a larger audience. A

sample of the applications to be used as core components of this project are

here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~andresmh/riskland/ along with instructions on

how to install them on a Nokia cell phone.

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