Overview
The Ambient Wood is an outdoor playful learning experience. Pervasive technologies are used to digitally augment a woodland in a contextually relevant way, enhancing the ‘usual’ physical experience available to children exploring the outdoor world. Studies show this to be a highly engaging novel experience for learners, that effectively supports collaborative learning, as well as providing preliminary guidelines for designing different ways of delivering digital information for learning.
Ambient Wood I
The first Ambient Wood study took place in a woodland in Sussex. Groups of four children aged 11-12 years from Varndean School, Brighton worked in pairs, in two different woodland habitats to learn about habitat distributions and interdependencies. The experience was designed to support scientific enquiry, through collaborative learning and encouraging exploration, discovery, hypothesizing, experimentation and reflection.
The experience was divided into three stages: exploration in the woodland; reflection and hypothesising in the den (a purpose built area for informal discussion); and experimentation back in the woodland. Children had a variety of devices with which to explore and experiment in the wood. These were used to trigger and present the 'added' digital information, sometimes caused by the children's automatic exploratory movements, and at other times determined by their intentional actions.
Exploration
Pairs of children explored either an open clearing within the woodland, or a dense wooded area to find out about the different habitats of plants and animals and the relationships between them.
As well as being able to explore the environment itself, pupils used tools that digitally augmented the environment, and enabled them to take their own readings of the area. In addition, their positional informationtriggered a variety of further details about the environment and its inhabitants.Pupils had a digitally enhanced probe tool to collect information about moisture and light in their habitats. The readings were displayed on a handheld computer as an image showing relative rather than numerical values.
Taking and moisture and light readings
In addition, information about the children’s position in the wood was recorded using GPS. On the basis of their location relevant information about living organisms in the wood was transmitted to their handheld computer.
Information is triggered to pupils via PDAs.
A 'periscope' in the wood also enabled children to access digital information about 'invisible' aspects of the wood such as seasonal changes or creatures not normally visible to the naked eye.
The Periscope
Children were accompanied by an adult facilitator in the wood, and were given walkie-talkies to report their findings to an adult facilitator in the den.
Reflection and hypothsising
A purpose built ‘den’ was used for children to reflect upon and discuss their findings from their explorations. To help them to reflect, compare their habitats and begin to hypothesise, they could reaccess their moisture and light readings on a computer, as well as using tagged tokens with digital feedback.
1.Using the reading display
2.Using tagged tokens for reflection
Experimentation
During the experimentation phase children were able to test their hypotheses about the effects of the introduction of other organisms on the habitats that they explored. To do this they used tagged objects in conjunction with the periscope to view those potential effects in the environment.
Testing hypothesis using tagged objects on the periscope
Findings
Analysis of studies of children in the Ambient Wood show ways in which wireless technologies can support new forms of collaborative interaction and reflection for learning. New technologies offer different ways of transmitting and triggering digital information. Our studies suggest that these vary in terms of their pervasiveness or direct control, which seems to be instrumental in the ways that this information is used and attended to.
See also
