Thursday, August 11, 2016: 2:30 PM
Grand Floridian Blrm D, Ft Lauderdale Convention Center
Background/Question/Methods
The Field Day Lab produces free and open authoring tools as a byproduct of conducting our own educational research. In the case of environmental education, several tools have been produced:
Siftr is a lightweight tool that allows anyone to create a citizen science or ethnography project in just a few minutes. Siftr lets you set up projects around specific topics where you and other participants can upload images on a map. The vision is to create a clearinghouse for the creation of citizen science projects.
ARIS is a user-friendly, open-source platform for creating and playing mobile games, tours and interactive stories. Using GPS and QR Codes, ARIS players experience a hybrid world of virtual interactive characters, items, and media placed in physical space.
The Nomen Project is our newest tool that allows anyone to create and use digital field guides. This tool allows the user to identify anything in the natural world. The creators use a simple spreadsheet to organize their data then it is uploaded into Nomen. The users can use this for identification more accurately and rapidly than traditional field guides.
The Nomen project is currently online as a prototype.
Results/Conclusions
While creating platforms for others to create is a timely and expensive process. With that in mind, we are seeing significant use of these three products, which we believe in the aggregate is a cost effective strategy for research and innovation.
ARIS has been used by over 40,000 people as of February, 2016. In the last year, 1751 ARIS games were created that had at least 5 pieces of content.
Siftr has been available for approximately 1 year. In that time 82 unique projects have been created that contained at least 10 contributions. 1374 users made at least 1 contribution to those projects.