ARIS Summit 2016

ARIS 101 is for newcomers. In an hour, you will become familiar enough with ARIS and the editor to be deadly. Phil will introduce the engine's basic conceptual features: objects, scenes, and triggers, and show you how to make them and put them together into a basic interactive experience. No experience or other skills needed. Bring a laptop (for making games in the editor) and iOS device (for trying your games out) if you can.

Make My Game! – This is the new, experimental session of the year. You suggest the topic, audience, setting, and any other important details or constraints, and a group of random ARISers to jam on it for an hour. We all can learn about the design process, and about synthesizing what we think we know about the subject area, AR, and ARIS, learning much more along the way.

This time, we will be following a suggestion set by ARIS vetran Craig Brumwell, relating to some themes in history he's interested in teaching. Chris H will facilitate.

Though Poppies Grow is a is a 4 episode history game where middle and secondary school students on educational tours to Europe use ARIS and Siftr to learn about the First World War. The first episode on local recruitment has two authoring challenges: a physical examination puzzle and a marching activity using ARIS factories. Join us in this one-hour mini-jam to see what different approaches to these problems emerge.

 

Jim will introduce you to Siftr (http://siftr.org), a new tool from Field Day. Siftr is a collaborative mapping web app. It is accessible from pretty much any browser, and allows authors to instantly create new containers for collaborative mapping. Jim will spend the first three minutes getting the audience up to speed on the technical side of using siftr, and use the remaining portion of the hour to help you think about how this tool can support inquiry into local places.

How do you determine a game's learning impact if every student plays the game and there isn't any control group? How can you conduct in-game data assessment without breaking the magic circle of gameplay? Strategies and ideas for data collection learned during a two year mixed methods, design-based research project using an ARIS game will be presented.

Did you make it through ARIS 101? Are you somewhat versed in the editor, but get a bit lost when it comes to connecting it all together? In this second ARIS workshop, Phil and Mike, developers at Field Day, will show you the connective pieces of ARIS: Locks and Events. Locks are the logical glue that turn simple tours into deep interactive experiences, and events are what connect the player's actions to the other parts of the game. Events are new to ARIS this last year. They are a vast extension of the old "modify player" verb, and open up reams of new possibilities.

ARIS is simple to use for everyone. But with a little bit of HTML and Javascript (including an ARIS-specific JS library "ARISJS"), you can take it much, much farther. Phil and Mike, lead developers will show you some basics of extending ARIS, and help you work through some possible scenarios.