Alternate reality games for computer science education

Abstract

Alternate reality games (ARG) are games that often blur the boundaries of reality and fiction. They use many different types of media to deliver an interactive narrative to the players and include puzzles that are part of a bigger quest that the players are trying to solve. They are not widely used in education and there is limited amount of research done considering their benefits to learning. However, especially some commercial entertainment ARGs have managed to engage people in collaborative problem solving very well. Therefore, benefits and issues of using ARGs in education, and especially in computer science education (CSE), are discussed in this paper. Alternate reality games could potentially be used to teach various computer science concepts, to enable student networking, and to promote computer science programs. A case study was conducted in order to research the potential of using alternate reality games in computer science education. The research of the case study is still in progress, but the preliminary results are promising. Therefore, we want to raise discussion of using alternate reality games in computer science education. © 2013 ACM.