There is a natural alliance between learning and personal mobile training technology, so that it is becoming feasible to equip learners with powerful tools to support their learning in many contexts over long periods of time, with an emphasis on equipping people with the skills and knowledge for a rapidly changing society.

Currently, to a large extent, commercial titles are the most successful products utilising games technology. An important part of the developing challenge will be to design games which teachers are willing to adopt as ‘tool’ in this competitive environment.

eMapps.com is a project funded under the European Commissions IST 6th Framework Programme (FP6).  Its focus is on demonstrating how games and mobile technologies can be combined to provide new and enriching experiences for children in the school curriculum and beyond. Its work will concentrate initially on Europe’s New Member States and school children in the age group 9-12.   It will support creativity in the classroom and outside and will contribute to practice for developing new teaching methodologies.

eMapps.com will devise a new form of training using games that can be played ‘live’ in the individual territory on a new generation of mobile devices using Internet GPRS/3G, SMS and MMS technologies for learning while gaming.

Challenges

A major potential barrier to integrating games use in learning and the school curriculum, or at any level, is the perceived mismatch between skills and knowledge developed in games, and those recognised explicitly within education systems. The recognition of skill development achievable through games is an important component in breaking down these barriers.

Teachers need to be engaged and to recognise and map the relationships between
activities in games and the associated learning before they can embed the use of the game within the wider learning context and be enabled to frame tasks, within the game or leading up to or following on from a lesson.

Many of the skills valuable for successful game play, and recognised by both teachers and parents, are as yet only implicitly valued within a school context. In future, learning will move increasingly from the classroom and into the learner’s environments, both real and virtual.

On a cognitive level, play encourages the development of our concepts about the world. By toying with objects and ideas through playful experimentation we develop an understanding of the physical world and our place within it. But as games increase in complexity and freedom, they will be able to accommodate many different playing styles and personal goals, mirroring the inner dynamics of the player’s personality.

The problem of narrative, of integrating a linear storyline within an interactive game is widely acknowledged as one of the most intractable problems in the field of games design. Although many techniques exist and will attract developers and gamers for a long time to come, none of them solve the hardest problem; creating a truly dynamic narrative, of creating virtual worlds or Mixed Realities (outdoor and indoor) where although the themes and imagery in the world remain consistent, the actions of different players lead to utterly different and credible outcomes.

To solve this problem, we need a way of designing a new learning game where teachers set the theme, the world-space where the game takes place, and the player can then explore and experience whatever permutations of that theme he or she desires.

This approach will also require the participants to draw upon a wide range of contextual content and to use new mobile devices in the creation and use of that content, whilst developing and playing games.  

Objectives of eMapps.com

The key results of eMapps.com will include:

• School teachers/managers or other from each of the eight participating countries will be qualified to implement and disseminate the game training course to at least 100 teachers through a series of local courses.
• A Handbook on using games for training, on English, will be produced, in a variety of formats.
• A web-based game training platform for course implementation with different target audiences.
• Evaluation of the need, relevance, and practicality of the implemented Game training course model will be conducted, and results made public, on the basis of relevant evaluations in each of the participating countries.
• Training courses plus two international conferences on using Games web-based for training different target groups, presenting in particular the project methodology and findings in each of the participating countries.
• A training course model based on ‘mixed reality’ games with customised interfaces to a wider European scenario for future training purposes.
• Exploitation and replication of the results emerging from the project through an extensive dissemination programme including an interactive project website, which will provide access to teachers and other school education staff.