Utilizing AR capabilities to enhance learning

Augmented Reality (AR) is an interactive experience technology that allows users to envision new perspectives within the real world simply by digitally enhancing it through the lens of a handheld device. Literally, one can use their camera-equipped smartphone to envision new furniture layouts in their actual living room, or travel to new countries and translate the languages on the signs around them just by holding up their phone. Naturally, this technology lends itself to gaming and education worlds where engagement is the name of the game, and thanks to its availability on any smartphone or tablet device, AR has the potential to become a powerful tool for immersive learning experiences accessible to a wide array of users.

That’s the spirit we started with as we embarked upon our first foray into AR with our educational game, Little Pizzeria. In Little Pizzeria, children aged 6 to 10 interact with characters Sally and Pizza Perry as together they learn how to improve Sally’s pizza recipe by growing the tomatoes used in the sauce. Children interact by reading specific verbal prompts as well as conducting small tasks along the way, such as planting seeds and choosing toppings for the final pizza, and they celebrate their success at the end with a surprise virtual pizza party alongside their new friends. The game teaches teamwork, kindness, and inquisitiveness on top of its main thesis, which is mindfulness about where our food comes from and our dependence on a healthy planet ecosystem.

This was Orta’s first foray into AR as well as into writing an interactive game aimed at young children and we encountered several challenges along the way. First and foremost was striking the balance between engagement and educational delivery. We wanted to create a learning experience that was fun and exciting enough to keep a child playing while using narrative gameplay to covertly convey enlightening material. To this end we chose to use every kid’s favorite fare, pizza, as a vehicle to address food origins, and to ensure limited loss of attention we chose to keep the scope of the story tightly bound to a single element of the pizza, the tomatoes that comprise the sauce.

Story:

Now that we had our basic setup, it was time to consider how precisely to convey our message, starting with establishing a motivation to learn about the pizza. When the child begins the game, they encounter a little girl named Sally, who acts as a friendly guide through the game. Sally has made a pizza and is looking to make an improvement upon her recipe, but why? It was important to us that we maintained a responsible narrative by only using positive motivators at every step of the way. For example, Sally could want to make a better pizza because someone else told her it was not good, but that establishes pressure to amend oneself due to bullying. Instead, we chose to create Sally as a confident character who simply seeks self-improvement for its inherent value. She has made a good pizza, but strives to keep making it better, until it is as good as everyone’s favorite from Pizza Perry’s Tomato Pie Parlor.

While Sally is this confident character, she is also willing and able to ask for help from others, including adults, and in this way demonstrates by example these positive behaviors. Through the interactive reading prompts, it is actually the child who initially suggests enlisting Pizza Perry’s assistance in the matter, further teaching this positive trait through interactive experience. This was one of the key elements of learning to write for an AR game aimed at kids, to create a narrative that empowered children with positive learning experiences on every level, not just towards the primary message.

Challenge:

In a more basic way, one of our challenges was meeting the reading and engagement level of children in the target age range of 6 to 10. After consultation with educational researchers and parents of such aged children, we made sure to keep our interactive reading prompts short and simple, meaning we stuck to high-frequency words and basic grammar that this age range is most likely to have encountered. The effect is a higher engagement level with the side bonus of working better with the voice recognition implementation.

Finally, once we had a working script it was necessary to make modifications as we began to integrate the story line into the AR environment. Some interactive moments needed to be changed to accommodate the overall scale of the AR objects. For example, the child originally was meant to chop the tomatoes for the sauce; however, the tomatoes were too small to create a meaningful interaction, and so this was changed to the child transferring tomatoes to a pot. Other such edits include cutting some dialogue to keep the game on the shorter side and changing the surprise party ending characters from a large family group to a smaller set of friends and animals due to limited space in which to place the animations. As well, we edited the introduction to gear it towards setting up the AR space, and smoothed out all scene transitions to work better with animation transitions.

In the end we have Little Pizzeria, a game we are proud of as our first AR interactive implementation. We are excited to release our work and collect impressions from children and parents, always with an eye towards our own learning experience of how to make further improvements on AR interactive narrative learning games.