high-school – Matthew McGowan

Horizns is my thesis project for the M.A. Program in Digital Media Design for Learning at NYU, created (in 2015) using the ARIS (Augmented Reality Interactive Storytelling) platform.

Here’s the back-of-the-box description:

Playable by anyone aged 12 and up, Horizns is a narrative-based, augmented reality (AR) game ultimately designed for collaborative storytelling in grades 7-12 ELA and/or Social Studies classrooms.

Players begin by participating in the (fictional) “Horizns Rewards Program,” an AR tour of the history of Times Square, NYC. The plot takes a dark turn, however, as players must “dystopify” the world around them; and everyone’s best chance at escaping a dire future means interacting with the dystopian visions of others.

“Lucky” introduces the backers of the Rewards Program.

The (2D) Map showing the plaques players can navigate to (and some profile/Notebook entries).

One of the five tokens Rewards Program participants must collect.

Kwellist, a hacker from a dystopian future.

m0rlock, another hacker from a dystopian future.

The (3D) Map showing an alternative (hacked) set of plaques.

Another alternative/hacked plaque (1976).

And another alternative/hacked plaque, this one showing an example of some of the speculative/concept art in the game.

Lucky, after the hackers have done some serious damage.

A sample Notebook entry detailing (in 140-420 characters) a dystopian vision of the future.

If you’re interested in my (six-minute) talk introducing Horizns to attendees of the ECT-DMDL Design Expo (5/15/15), you can find it here. [Warning: Contains spoilers! ;-)]

My general aim with this project was to make something that was a) genuinely constructivist and constructionist; and b) a genuinely engaging gaming experience. More specifically, as far as learning theory goes, the game’s design is ultimately driven by the notion of “Social Imagination,” which Maxine Greene defines as learners’ “capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, and in our schools” (Releasing the Imagination, 2005, p. 5). And for a bit more on the theory behind Horizns‘ design, please feel free to check out my Design Expo poster (pdf).

During a Game/Mobile Design internship at the American Museum of Natural History (Fall 2014) I worked on a program called “The Neanderthal Next Door,” which was

a 27-session youth program for 21 12th-graders that’s designed to develop and implement a digitally augmented (augmented reality-enhanced) print activity guide that explores the topic of human evolution through the frame of Neanderthals.

The piece of the program I worked on the most was developing a design-thinking approach that would guide the 12th-graders in their work. Given the time we had with the students, I thought an approach that used a selection of Stanford d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg cards would work best. Below is a post about a few of the sessions that the program’s director, Barry Joseph, asked me to write for his blog, mooshme.org:

“‘PEOPLE NEED A CHANGE IN LIGHTING BECAUSE THEY WALK TO THE RIGHT’ – USING DESIGN-BASED LEARNING WITH MUSEUM TEENS”

Instructor facilitating POV Madlibs for high school students — The POV Mad Libs discussion – lead by the program’s Science Educator, Marissa Gamliel.

One of the many shuffles I did of d.school's Bootcamp Bootleg deck. — One of the many shuffles I did of d.school’s Bootcamp Bootleg deck.

And here’s an earlier part of the program curriculum focused on design (using the Bootcamp Bootleg deck):

d-school cards for sessions 9-16 (pdf)

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“‘PEOPLE NEED A CHANGE IN LIGHTING BECAUSE THEY WALK TO THE RIGHT’ – USING DESIGN-BASED LEARNING WITH MUSEUM TEENS”

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