The Hidden Park: Great Concept, Cool Technology, Careful Narrative Design

Imagine a portable learning toolbox with these capabilities:

• GPS
  
• A digital camera
• An accelerometer

Now bring to it a conceptual framework:

• Alternative reality gaming
• Geochaching
  

What are the possibilities? What if you added a bit of story, a bit of fantasy, and loads of imagination?

You or I probably still wouldn't come up with The Hidden Park, but, luckily for us, the people at Bulpadok did. Here is a brief description from their press kit:

The adventure begins when the children receive a video call from a troll named Trutton, head of the Magical Wildlife Protection Association. Trutton explains that their park is in danger of being bulldozed by greedy developers. The kids must collect evidence to prove the existence of magical animals in their park.

The children navigate their way through the park by following a map that lets them know where the magical creatures live. Of course, Trutton’s map is magical – as they move past landmarks in the park the map tells them where to go next. The children must solve puzzles and riddles on their way to the next destination. Clues to the answers can be found on the signposts in the park.

Following Trutton’s directions, the children take photos of various landmarks. As if by magic, Trutton’s fantastical friends appear in the photos – sometimes right next to the children! The photos are stored in a gallery, so at the end of the day the children have an album of their adventure.

Very, very cool. So: Great concept. Smart, innovative people thinking outside of the box. Nifty technology. Contemporary aesthetic look and feel. That's what it takes, right? But what role did narrative design play? Narrative is clearly an element, but did it matter? Did they just hit the jackpot of a serendipitous cross over of cool technologies and a neat concept and then threw in a fun story as the frosting on the cake?

Oh, no. Not even close.

If you go to the blog of the creators of the game and look up the post titled Shaping the Story, you will see that they took the narrative element very, very seriously. These cutting edge game designers discuss Aristotle's classic three act structure, the narrative arc, and several modern storytelling theorists. Narrative design, it appears, was a central consideration of their game design, and, I would venture, central to the success of the product. These people thought long and hard about what the right narrative structure for the product should be, and have some very interesting thoughts on the mapping of a story arc to physical geography. An excerpt:

One of the really fun things about writing The Hidden Park was being able to physically map the narrative shape over the landscape. Many of the pathways that we plotted actually physically drew an arc through space. While this was satisfying at some theoretical level, it also became important for storytelling. We didn’t want people to double back over territory they had already covered and we didn’t want people to cross back over their path. The Hidden Park is a simple linear narrative and it was important for that to be reflected geographically. We wanted to create the feeling of physically moving forward through the story.

As GPS gaming evolves, it may be desirable to maintain a consistency between the shape of the narrative and its position in real space. Where a detective story leads the protagonist around in circles, a GPS mystery may literally lead the player back to where they started. Often in a story, a writer wants to revisit a particular theme and reveal something new to their audience. By requiring a player to physically return to a location, their path will trace the intricate folds and layers of sophisticated storytelling.

They go on to say that this mapping of physical space to the storytelling structure is not a hard and fast rule. But my point is to call attention to their careful consideration to the narrative structure of the product. They did their theoretical homework, and it pays off in the final product. Without a strong narrative, the product would have been gadgety cool and amusing. With the narrative, it becomes a compelling adventure that leads the player forward, as they state, "with direction and purpose."

So if we revisit the list of key features from their website, there seems to be a hidden element that didn't make the list:

• GPS
  
• A digital camera
• An accelerometer
• Alternative reality gaming
• Geochaching

and...

• ???

Go ahead, snap a photo with your iPhone and see what shows up...

Planning for Engagement in Instructional Design

Pat Parrish had an engagement plan for his course. It looked* something like this:


He thought that students would generally start with lower levels of engagement, that that engagement would grow as they learned new material and completed assignments, that it would plateau in the middle of the course, and then rise to a climax near the end of the course when the applications of their learning became more apparent to them. Pat measured the engagement of each student throughout the course. Each line represents one student's reported engagement on a per module basis. This* is what he found:



Wow. Try following any one path through the chart. Now compare it to any other path on the chart. Explain why the two paths are different. Good luck.

So what's the point? Two points.

First point: Pat is way ahead of the curve. Pat actually had an engagement plan. He actually thought about how each part of the course would engage learners and to what extent he thought it would. He actually implemented learning activities to reflect his plan. Have any of the rest of us really tried that? Do we have a plan for engaging students in any systematic way? Do we have picture of the ideal engagement arc of our course in our heads? Or are we just focused on achieving learning objectives (somehow) or, worse, content coverage, and hope/assume that engagement will happen? Or are we resigned to the sad fact that learners choose to be engaged or not engaged, period, not my problem? Is this how a screenwriter, a playwright, or a music composer would think about their audience? I believe that while learners do have a choice to engage, we also have a choice of deciding how seriously we are going to try to reach out to them in engaging ways. How determined of a suitor of meaningful student engagement are we going to be?

Second point: Pat's students were all over the map. And we have no idea why (though I imagine that Pat has some guesses). Most of us have students like Pat. I would bet valuable property that 95% of us would find a similar, random looking set of curves if we tried the same experiment in our courses. We have no idea why they are or aren't engaged. We have no idea why in module 7, one student who had been averaging between a 6 and a 4 dropped to a 2 when six other students posted increasing engagement scores for the same module. This is the sort of thing that I feel like we really, really need to know. We should be able to read these patterns, perhaps not easily or perfectly, but we should at least have a sense of why these things are happening.

If we want to engage learners, and I do, we had better start finding ways to create and understand charts like Pat's. We are at the starting point of this kind of research (to my knowledge, if I am wrong, please let me know). The point when everything looks like random chaos. But it isn't random. There is a reason for every bend up or down on those curves. Let's go find out what is going on so we can design in engagement into our learning experiences. Yes, the learners have to choose, but let's give them every reason to choose to engage.

*Graphics used by permission; taken from an AECT 2007 presentation. Update: looks like Pat put the paper on his website.

Holistic Education vs. Holistic Learning vs. Holistic Learning Experiences

tsharvey (who also happens to be my brother-in-law) asked this question and I thought it was worth responding to in a post rather than just a comment.

tsharvey said:

I don't think I've ever encountered the term 'holistic learning experiences' —of course, I'm not in the instructional design field. While I can speculate what you might mean by holistic learning experiences (and how it might differ from ideas such as integrated learning environments), can you clarify or provide examples of such approaches?

My answer: There is a Holistic Education movement that is more expansive than I am referring to that you can read about here or at wikipedia. If you are interested, a colleague of mine recommends this book:
Holistic Education: An Analysis of Its Ideas and Nature (The Foundations of Holistic Education Series, V. 8)*
(*Amazon link -- I am an Amazon associate -- but you can also buy it here and I won't get a dime.)

There is also something called "holistic learning" by Patrick G. Love and Anne Goodsell Love. They define this as

the integration of intellectual, social, and emotional aspects of undergraduate student learning. (reference)

That is closer, since I am interested in all three aspects of learning. So what exactly do I mean by "holistic learning experiences"? What I am getting at is that, in the field of instructional design, most models require an analysis of the content that breaks it down into ever smaller pieces until you have all these little parts of knowledge. Then, many models say, you teach this piece this way and that piece that way and when you are done teaching all of the pieces, the learner will know what they need to know. This can become a fragmented, decontextualized kind of experience. Our university system is an analogy, where individual disciplines can get so focused on themselves they lose sight of the big picture and fail to collaborate with each other to research cross-disciplinary issues.

When I say holistic learning experience, I mean designing the experience with the whole as well as the parts in mind. What will the overall structure be? How will we make sure the parts are related to each other meaningfully? When is it better for the learner to experience the material in larger chunks (and, at times, with more ambiguity)? This is one of the reasons I am interested in narrative, because I believe that narrative design has to pay attention to both the whole and the parts at the same time to be successful, and I think my field can learn from that.

"Holistic learning experiences" is a term I made up. I am open to suggestions if a better one comes to mind.

Joseph

Learning as a Human Experience

I was trained as an instructional designer and have worked as one now for over a decade. As Brenda Bannan-Ritland said to me recently, "I honor that tradition." But I feel drawn to other disciplines that can inform it, unconventional design approaches that can improve it, and a new emphasis on learners as human beings, whose hearts are inseparably connected to their heads. When we learn, we feel, and not enough designers of learning experiences care enough about that. And it is worth caring about. It is worth designing for. It can make all the difference.

In this blog, I explore the many, many places outside the field (and a few inside) where designers have chosen to account for the human experience in a holistic way. I explore what it feels like to be a learner and how design can impact that experience. I explore how we can make learning rewarding to the human mind and enriching to the human spirit.

Please join me.

Joseph