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home > Media services > News > Young people play m-games at eMAPPS.com summer school Young people play m-games at eMAPPS.com summer school Using 3G mobile phones with built in cameras and GPS devices, groups of young people took part in educational games to explore the historic town of Torun in Poland during the second eMAPPS.com summer school 4-8 June 2007. The games scenarios written by the teachers or students are mostly connected to the history of the local area and include the wider environment, links to the town’s museums, sights and archives. Games are mostly played by two teams, one team is at the control base with a laptop connected to the game platform and the Internet and passes clues to play the game to the game desktop, whereas the other team plays in the territory using their mobile devices. The Polish team was under special observation during the workshop as the partners could follow school students one afternoon while playing the game. Manchester Metropolitan University will validate the pedagogical impact of the games. EUN is responsible for other validation aspects and got feedback from the schools using the SIPTEC framework to evaluate the project (system level, institutional, technical and cultural aspects). The summer school offered various practical workshops for teachers and national coordinators. EUN presented a learning-resource repository called MINOR and obtained useful user feedback. It is a platform that allows teachers in different countries to describe and share the learning resources they produce. All partners connected to the Learning Resources for Europe federation developed by EUN can then discover those resources. The new technical coordinator of the project, the University of Ljubljana, introduced the Living Map of Europe. During a European evening organised by the Polish hosts, on New Technologies in Schools in Europe, the first results of the project were presented to local authorities and policy makers. eMAPPS.com is a project funded under the European Commission IST 6th Framework Programme (FP6). It focuses 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. The project, which began in October 2005, ends in February 2008 with dissemination events including a workshop for policy-makers in Prague and a regional workshop in Tallinn, 7-9 Nov 2007. In early 2008 EUN will publish a report aimed at policy-makers bringing together the lessons learnt from the project and the exploring the potential of mobile gaming for schools. More on emapps Report: The use of ICT, games and mobile technology in the New Member States (Insight)
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