Abstract:

Over the last ten years, spatial literacy has been recognized as a key competence in the workspace and daily life. Despite this insight, school curricula are slow to adopt specific spatial literacy teaching; instead, it is still a byproduct of other teaching finalities (e.g., in maths, arts,...).

We present NavApps, an educational game developed under the EU Erasmus+ Project ENAbLE, which aims to foster and reinforce spatial literacy in secondary school students. It is an indoor map-based treasure hunting game in which indoor positioning and wayfinding techniques are used to train spatial skills. Specifically, NavApps focuses on spatial orientation, map interpretation and spatial reasoning, as these skills were found to be most recurrent in the national secondary school curriculum in the country of study, Spain.

NavApps is a combination of a collaborative and competitive game, whereby typical gamification techniques (i.e., scores & scoreboards, badges, unlocking gameplay,...) are used to capture and retain the students’ interest. It consists of four phases: drawing school boundaries, mapping physical locations, planting and finding treasures.

In the first, preparatory phase, students are asked to delineate the boundaries of their school, its buildings, floors and rooms. They do so using the Web-based NavApps app, which allows them to collaboratively draw the aforementioned features on a map using basic polygons, hereby creating the school’s floorplan. This phase trains the students’ map interpretation and spatial reasoning skills.

Once this is done, students move to the native mobile app to complete the remaining phases. The second phase is a location finding challenge, where students are presented with details of a series of locations (building, floor and room; location on map) and asked to physically visit these locations. While being fun and training map interpretation and spatial reasoning skills, this phase internally captures WiFi fingerprints (WiFi name, signal strength, etc.) at predefined, well-distributed locations over the school. These fingerprints form the basis of our proprietary indoor positioning algorithm, to be used in later phases.

The third phase is the treasure planting, where students plant treasures at certain locations in the school (aided by the indoor position algorithm), indicating its properties. Doing so, students train their spatial orientation, map interpretation and spatial reasoning skills.

Finally, in the treasure hunting phase, the students search for treasures planted by their fellow students. They do so by means of various wayfinding techniques, each specifically designed to train specific spatial skills. Examples of wayfinding techniques are textual description using cardinal directions or map-based indications based on proximity. NavApps tracks the student’s current position, and uses the treasures position to guide wayfinding. Treasure discovery is validated by comparing the users current position with the position of the treasure, and by requiring the student to answer a question about the treasure (information provided by the treasure planter). During this phase, students train the same skills as in the previous phase

Keywords:

Geogame, spatial literacy, spatial skills, high school education, gamification, mobile learning, indoor location, serious game.