Social Studies – 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 the 2018-19 school year, The Town School’s the 4th-grade faculty significantly reworked their Social Studies curriculum. The result was a year-long consideration of the question, “What is an American?”

For their culminating project, 4th-graders researched lesser-known participants in the American Revolutionary War–especially enslaved Africans, Black freemen, First Peoples, and women. Then, in their Technology class, using Tinkercad and working in small groups, students designed monuments to commemorate the “heroes” they had researched.

Once 3D-printed, we placed the monuments on wooden bases (which were cut and painted by the school’s Facilities Department). Affixed to the front of the bases were QR codes, which linked to Google Docs that contained information (composed in 4th-grade Writing class) on the historical figures’ wartime contributions.

The final product was displayed in the school’s library for all visitors to see and interact with.

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