Augmentation and Realism in an Embodied Foraging Simulation

• In Event: Movement, Environment, and Meaning in Learning

Abstract

Wild animals balance quality, competition, and risk in deciding when and where to forage. An emergent outcome of maximizing individual yields is that this also results in the most productive use of available resources for the population as a whole. We address these understandings in "Hunger Games" (Gnoli et al., 2014), a multi-week unit in which students serve as foragers in a series of "bouts" in increasingly challenging habitats. In a pilot enactment, three classes of 18 sixth-grade students carried small personal stuffed animals (with embedded RFID tags, Fig. 1) among six "food patches" (RFID readers, Fig. 2) of varying quality, distributed around the classroom, where they competed for calories as a function of time spent at the patch, patch quality, and competition from other foragers.

We focus here on two ways that the augmentations shaped learning. The first was a fortuitous outcome forced by limitations imposed by our technology and environment. Originally, we had planned to embed RFID tags in bracelets or lanyards worn by students, but signal interference forced us to use the stuffed "avatars" (in order to get the tags close enough to the readers). The avatars proved popular with the students, but more importantly, exposed an unexpected affordance: the ability to be in two places at once. Students used this opportunity to simultaneously participate as foragers (leaving their avatars in food patches) and as reflective practitioners (Schön, 1983) unconstrained by location (visiting other food patches or public resources). This resulted in a highly social and competitive environment. Student foraging behavior in the study closely matched that of actual animal populations, approaching an ideal free distribution (perfect resource matching) after a small number of bouts.

The second group of augmentations included a public display at each patch (iPads that acknowledged the arrival and departure of foragers and showed instantaneous yield) and a pair of larger displays that depicted distinctive representations of emergent group behaviors. One display presented a (coded) bar graph all students' total caloric gain (Fig. 3). A second display used a graphical representation to reflect the cumulative utilization of each food patch. We found that students were able to work fluently with the representations during post-foraging reflective activities, and we conjecture that this fluency was enhanced by (a) interest raised by the fact that the representation was of their own activity, and (b) the opportunity to watch the representation grow from scratch during enactment.

Hunger Games used simple props (stuffed avatars, plastic leaves and acorns) to evoke the real world context, and the unit began with observation of squirrels foraging in a local park. The embodied representation specifically afforded opportunistic interaction among learners and student behaviors created opportunities for discussion of despotic behaviors (deceit, threats, or muscle) arising in nature that would be unlikely to be difficult to provide in non-embodied implementations. At the same time, information augmentations (and the use of movement to access them) leverage technologies to provide insights that would be difficult to obtain from natural foraging habitats.

Authors

• Tom Moher, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Anthony Perritano, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Paulo Guerra, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Brenda A. Lopez Silva, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Alessandro Gnoli, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Joel Brown, University of Illinois at Chicago