– Peter Kiefer (ETH Zürich) presented at the ifgi Summer School 2014 on Gamyfing Spatial Collaboration using our CityPoker Designer and staging a game.

– Barbara Feulner (Augsburg University) staged a Neocartographer event with school kids evaluating urban public spaces in Augsburg

www.geogames-team.org/designer/

1. Choose your town
2. Arrange a game board – the designer assists you!
3. Print your game board
4. Play!

Just give it a try! A brief introduction to the game is provided within the editor. All you need to play is the possibility to send messages from one team to the other!

A more precise workflow of the tool and its use cases in classes on geography at school will be published until August 2014 in the in the most widely read journal for geography teachers in Germany, Praxis Geography.

Got you? Drop us a line: geogames[at]uni-bamberg.de

Christoph Schlieder: Learning to Understand Geodesigns by Playing Geogames

Abstract. The Playful Approaches to Geodesign Project (PlayGeo) at the University of Bamberg, Germany, applies concepts and technologies from location-based games to education in a general curriculum on spatial thinking. A collection of Geogames is created in which the players explore outdoor environments using GPS smartphones to access information, to complete documentation tasks, and to analyze spatial problems. The project uses ArcGIS for Android technology to build a game platform which assists educators to stage a Geogame in their local geographic environment. We present first lessons learned from the project and describe two scenarios for playful approaches to the early stages of the design process, that is, to understand an existing urban design (design reading games) as well as to discuss and evaluate a design (urban usability games). Based on an empirical study of a design reading game, we identify success factors for the playful approach to Geodesign.

One or more playing events will also be organized for interested people. This time the CityPoker game was chosen for demonstration. In CityPoker two players or teams start with a given poker hand and try to improve it by moving around in an outdoor environment to find cards hidden in caches.

If you need more information or are interested in participating in the Geogames event or just want to chat about gamification and GIS, please write an email to and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Christoph Schlieder & Olga Yanenko:
Location-based Games in Education and Tourism

Abstract. Location-based games introduce an element that is missing in interactive console games, namely locomotion in outdoor environments such as an urban neighborhood or a natural park. These games are particularly interesting for educational projects with school children because they not only connect the players socially but also connect them with the geographic environment. Most location-based games use GPS as positioning technology and let the players communicate with mobile handheld devices such as smartphones. The talk concentrates on this type of games, especially on game designs that combine strategic reasoning with sportive types of locomotion. Research issues are illustrated with case studies from educational and touristic applications. The game relocation problem is presented as a major challenge. It arises from the fact that a location-based game design exploits specific features of the geographic environment. Relocating the game to a different environment therefore involves more or less complex spatial analysis, for instance, of pedestrian paths between points of interest.

Visit the USC homepage for more details. The talk is also available online.

The game has been designed as a playful introduction to geospatial analysis, more specifically, to the concept of Voronoi neighborhood. However, there is also a game variant in which the players do not need to familiarize themselves with that concept. Neocartographer balances reasoning and action in an intricate way and is generally played as a pedestrian game. It takes a few minutes to get acquainted with the rules and the smartphone interface. With the game itself lasting about half an hour, Neocartographer is an ideal choice for applications where temporal constraints are tight such as a tech demo in the context of a scientific conference.