Teaching TEam Coordination with LOcation-aware Games (TTeCLoG)

Teaching team coordination and communication skills is difficult, but critical in organizations. The Teaching Team Coordination with Location-aware Games Project, or TTeCLoG ("tech-log"), designs games from a grounding in practice to teach and enhance these skills through embodied interaction. We investigate real-life team coordination practices and integrate results into game designs. Participants play team games outdoors that require them to coordinate and communicate with one another in order to be successful.

The basis of the TTeCLoG project is grounded in work and teaching practice. Part of the project conducts ethnographic inquiry into the processes of team coordination in fire emergency response at the Emergency Services Training Institute. Investigations at the school have uncovered sigificant details of how emergency response work is coordinated in practice, and these details are integrated into game designs.

Data suggest the concept of non-mimetic simulation: an operational environment that requires the use of abstract skills without all of the concrete elements of the mimicked environment. Non-mimetic simulation allows learners to practice a subset of important skills in a different way that is quick and easy to develop. Creating games around such simulations add engagement, encouraging students to practice.

The data further suggest that typical simulation/game setups are not suitable for encouraging team coordination. Real-life teams coordinate successfully in spite of, and sometimes because of, being geographically distributed. Team members come together and split up, sharing information face-to-face or using broadcast remote transports (radio). Multiple perspectives and backgrounds are combined dynamically, creating distributed cognition. Desktop setups require participants to be stationary: bound to their machine. Wearable systems, on the other hand, enable participants to roam the environment, naturally coming together and breaking apart.

TTeCLoG develops location-aware experiences, non-mimetic simulation games in which participants coordinate and communicate.

publications

Toups, Z. O., Kerne, A., Implicit Coordination in Firefighting Practice: Design Implications for Teaching Fire Emergency Responders, Proc ACM Computer Human Interaction 2007, San Jose, April 2007.

Toups, Z. O., Kerne, A., Location-Aware Augmented Reality Gaming for Emergency Response Education: Concepts and Development, Proc ACM Computer Human Interaction 2007 Workshop on Mobile Spatial Interaction, San Jose, April 2007.

Toups, Z. O., Graeber, R., Kerne, A., Tassinary, L., Berry, S., Overby, K., Johnson, M., A Design for Using Physiological Signals to Affect Team Game Play, Proc Augmented Cognition International, Oct 2006: San Francisco, In press.