studentquest 2006 aka "Who is Herring Hale?"

This describes an Alternate Reality Game project I designed and ran in 2006, finally putting something up online about it to point people at!

Overview
studentquest took place in Term 1, Academic Year 2006/2007 as a pilot project to investigate the use of game formats to introduce support information and services, primarily to first years.

• An online and offline treasure-hunt game
• Fun, intriguing and engaging
• Optional for all students
• Develops key IT and social skills
• Encourages awareness of support services
• 1 (30 minute) clue per week over the term

Each week’s clue covered one of the major support services and codes and cryptic content were hidden within “normal” information. The clues were presented through a time-travel thriller storyline. First years achieving a score of 6 or more on the “New Student Quiz” (217 students) were directly invited via email to play. Cryptic notices were placed on Community@Brighton inviting any other interested students to sign-up (68 students). Partner college students who are eligible to use the University support services are welcome to play.


Clues for each section were developed by the relevant Department in collaboration with the Learning Technologies Group to. Clues focussed on the support areas each Department wished to promote.

Emails triggering the tasks and student responses to the tasks were handled via the Education Detective email address (H.Hale@brighton.ac.uk) managed by LTG support staff. A Community area was set up for students to communicate with each other.

Scores were recorded and published to the players weekly based on completion of tasks, speed bonuses and tip bonuses for those that helped the others without revealing the solution.

Mini-prizes were available in some weeks as detailed below. The main prize was a Video iPod each (total £1000 provided by LearnHigher) for the top 4 scorers, with all other players who completed all tasks receiving a 1G USB stick (total £250 provided by the Learning Technologies Group). The students were not aware what the prizes were or how many there were at any point until the quest completed.

Timeline and Clue Details

Freshers week Pre-advertising via Fresher’s fair leaflets
Game Week 0 New Student Quiz (open to all new students), prize: 2 iPods
Game Task 1 Locate a desk loan book and find a specific name (IS / Library)
Game Task 2 Find and apply for a specific job (Job Workshop)
Game Task 3 Decode a clue hidden in the Meals Vouchers leaflet, prize: Free coffee voucher sent to all players (Catering)
Game Task 4 Decode a message handed out by Pool Room Helpers, prize: £5 print credit to first 50 to complete, Notebook with clue (Desktop Systems)
Game Task 5 Register on the UBSU website and complete a Sudoku (Students’ Union)
Game Task 6 Spot clues hidden in the Fire Safety Video, prize: Free smoke alarm to first 20 to complete (Health & Safety)
Game Task 7 Reflect on their first terms study in the Good Study Guide blog, prize: Baseball cap given to everyone who blogged (with clue) (CLT/Good Study Guide)
Game Task 8 Find information placed in the “Look After Yourself” section of Student Services and on Posters (Student Services)
Game Task 9 View a video and collaborate to take photos and load on Community (Learning Technologies)
Last week of term Debriefing, prize distribution, evaluationParticipation and Evaluation
In total 42 students completed at least 1 task (15% of those invited). 12 students (29% of all active players) completed all 9 tasks.

All of the final 12 were invited for “debriefing” (informal interview) for evaluation purposes and to hand over prizes. 8 interviews took place. Comments were also invited from students who had started but failed to complete the quest via email. Some comments were also received on the Community area.

Feedback from the 12 students who completed all tasks:

• "In induction week they tell you where to go to get help, Careers for instance. But you forget it all 5 minutes after you've left. This was brilliant - now I really know where to go."
• “I was wrapped up in too much programming, it helped give me a break and get a new perspective”
• “…a really good way to learn”
• “Thank you all for a wonderful and inspiring term! From chasing orange techie people to strapping spoons on my forehead, its been fun :)”


Feedback from the students who began but dropped out:

• “I didnt really understand the student quest - I cant remember how I managed to join it and wondered what it was all about!”
• “I completed the tasks all the way until the final two. I just found the last two tasks too time consuming as I had to search around the uni for the posters and I am only here two days a week and don't live on campus.”
• “In brief, holding down a three day a week job, plus two days studying on campus, plus study time, in addition to at least one hours travel in each direction five days a week, didn't really leave me much spare time to be carrying out tasks! Think it was a good idea for first year undergrads living locally, as a way of finding out stuff about campus etc, but doing an MA and a job etc didn't leave me any spare time to sleep, let alone anything else!”
Author’s Verdict and Future Developments
I believe the Alternate Reality Game/Treasure-Hunt format provides an interesting alternative to existing mechanisms for introducing students to certain types on information or services. This format does not appeal to all students, but is very effective for those that like it. The format also provides students with something special to feel part of and to provide a break from their formal course.

Particularly successful was the final task involving working with other “recruits” to take photos around the campuses.

Problems were identified using pigeon holes as delivery mechanisms for prizes and clues as some students do not have pigeon holes, and inter-site delivery was not always predictable.

I would like to repeat the quest in Term 1, Academic Year 2007/2008 with more publicity, and more planning in order to raise it’s profile and work in parallel with existing induction processes. Support Services and Information Skills leant themselves well to this sort of format and can be the focus of the next iteration of the quest.

The Never Ending Uni Quiz

This article describes a current project I designed and developed - republished from Academic Practices, Newletter for the Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of Brighton

The Never Ending Uni Quiz, is an online quiz, aimed primarily at new students to help increase awareness of university services and support. Launched in June 2008, the quiz has had well over 1500 active players, and new members are still joining daily. Applicants, who were due to start at the University in September, were able to play the quiz before arrival, learn about the university and to start to feel a sense of belonging.

In their own words, the students have this to say about the quiz:

• “I have found it informative about the university and have found out things I would not have otherwise known.”
• “I like quizzes and think it is a fun way to learn about Uni.”
• “The fact that the quiz was everything to do with the university, and I was a first year student eager to know more about the university especially because at the time I started the quiz, I had not yet started university.”

The quiz questions are continually updated and added to from staff across the university - including questions on the Senior Management Team, campus maps, parking arrangements and the local towns.
One of the fundamental elements of the quiz is a leaderboard - putting all the players into teams based on their level and campus. This added element of competition - between teams and also between individual players has been identified as the key to the strong engagement observed.

Solving the VLE/PLE problem

As you' ve read (see earlier post) I'm spending far too much time worrying about how to get all the security, control and privacy of a VLE (Blackboard) whilst providing students and tutors with choice in the range of learning tools they choose to use.

I re-read Martin Weller's 2007 post on the topic this week, which really got me thinking about what problems we need to solve in order to enable the best of both worlds. And I've also been reading about outsourcing student email using Google, to see how they solve the problems of integrating with existing Uni infrastructure. And the nice thing is, the technology is really getting there. We can have single-sign-on from our existing Active Directory to Google. And with things like Open-ID coming along nicely there's a lot more scope for solving the authentication problems.

So what else? Integrating with student records systems. How can we make it easy for a lecturer to get his cohort registered on a randomly selected external web-based tool? Well I can imagine building a nice little utility that could generate class lists - usernames, email addresses etc exportable as XML, csv or whatever was required. In fact most of this work is already done as we have a web-based tool to pull up lists based on various criteria, so all I need to do is add some export options. Hopefully that would put the power in the hands of the tutor to set up their cohorts wherever they liked.

I'm more and more of the opinion that the actual web interface for Blackboard will be of less importance, but getting the data out of it in useful ways - and data back into it in terms of feeding grades and updates back into the central systems is the way to go.