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Projects
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Ambient Wood | Ambient Wood I
Ambient
Wood I (2002)
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.
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Taking
and moisture and light readings
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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.
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Information
is triggered to pupils via PDAs.
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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.
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The Periscope
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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.
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1.Using the reading display
2.Using tagged tokens for reflection
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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.
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Testing hypothesis using tagged objects on the periscope
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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
[ Back to Equator Project Page
]
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