ARHG! PU!

I've tried a number of time to write about Power Users, and I've never managed to finish anything and polish it to a point where I'd be alright publishing it. Every time I start talking about it I start rambling. There's so much to cover, and everything ties into everything else, and I don't know everything about it even now.
So this time, I'm sticking to only one aspect: The project we students put together. More, what went wrong with that project. And I'm trying to keep it on topic.

What went wrong with Augmented Reality in Power Users?
I'll go through this in order of when I started realizing these were issues.

0. We weren't given a choice. We weren't told that we had to make an Augmented Reality Hand-held Game (ARHG), but it was definitely assumed that we would and no other options or suggestions from us were really paid attention to.
I understand now that there was a reason for this, and a good reason if you look from where the decision was maybe never even considered and only assumed.
We all had substantial skills in programming, and in artfully using technology. We were impressive as it happened, but if we'd been able to choose our areas of comfort we would have been able to Shine Shine Shine. We also would have had at least a toe in our comfort zone, so probably would have been better able to describe what we were doing, why, what we were learning from it, and how is was being applied to the larger project that we were all working on.

1. The AR program was in Beta. It didn't work well or smoothly, and there were a handful of bugs that needed to be fixed. I think there's more to this than I should explicitly know, but the program not working well speaks for itself.

2. There weren't a whole lot of features or actions. Or, at least, we didn't know about everything that could be done with the program. Many of the features were probably listed to us or brought up as we discussed what we were planning to do with it, but that missed the point. We were looking at the project from a perspective of what we could do with AR rather than what we wanted to do with AR or what we thought would make ours a good game.
I'm of the opinion that even if AR had been explained to us inside and out and we retained all of that information, we still would've looked at it from the perspective of "what features can we use?" rather than "what feature would work best for what we want to do?". Part of the point was to show off AR, which meant using as many features as possible. Although, more specifically it was to show off the potential of ARHG, which would have best been done by using features effectively.
But we didn't know any of that motive, or weren't supposed to.
A student I know comes to mind. He likes to pull out a whole lot of code, presumably to figure out what it does. But what greater purpose does the code serve if there is no purpose in mind beyond learning what each block does? Simplified: What does it do? Nothing.
Using everything you possibly can is an effective way to learn the program quickly. I think I'll call it Spam Learning though, because it doesn't usually serve a purpose beyond knowing what everything does. If you use a feature simply to figure out what it does, it's unlikely you'll see a practical use for it later because you haven't actually assimilated it into your thinking, far less likely you'll use it to any real effect the first time around, and (depending on the particulars of abstraction) nearing impossible you'll use it in the same way as someone else. That last was something the research side definitely wanted of us ("...using...in...unintended ways"). But without it being effective, what value did using things in unintended ways really have? On the whole, what does it do? Nothing. This goes back to my first point that we should have been given the explicit option to choose what tool or tools we'd use.

3. GPS in Costa Rica was hard to get. There weren't a whole lot of satellites over the country, and we were in a park with big trees that blocked signal. So that whole aspect was lost.

4. The game we built didn't depend on the GPS. Not only was it not location specific, it was not location relevant either. Or relevant in any but the most vague manner.
In Erik's book (Augmented Learning, Klopfer, 2008; which I'm not writing about in the foreseeable future because I'm far too close to it) he makes a point about ARHG being able to be both location-specific and location-nonspecific. He does a much better job of it than I could, but the point is that AR can be both flexible (played anywhere) and relevant to an area (tied to a specific place).
It was a good thing that we hadn't made the game effectively tie into the space we were given, but the reasons we hadn't made it tie in were the wrong ones. The GPS was just another feature we were trying to use in some seemingly relevant way.
It's like rain. It's good when it doesn't rain because you can go out and do whatever it is you need to do without having to deal with the wet. But on a larger scale it can be very bad when it doesn't rain, because then water is scarce, crops fail, etc., etc., etc..
It's good logistically that our game didn't depend on the GPS, but in the bigger picture we missed the point of the GPS entirely. It's good that no one as blind as we were has control over the weather.

5. The game we built wasn't as far as we wanted it to be or intended to take it. I include this because I thought it was important when we were about to present, but in retrospect it seems the least important part of PU At Large. Maybe it was even beneficial in that if we'd finished what we were planning we would have presented it in a way that would reveal how ignorant we were of what was really going on.

6. The point of view we had when looking at the game and the tool were misunderstood by everyone, ourselves included.
So. We're finalizing our presentation and about to run through it, without adults and cameras for a change. I'd passed out the night before when the rest of the group put it all together.
I make a comment about how we really didn't accomplish anything in the way of modeling the spread of Bird Flu, which was our original goal. Someone responds by saying "Why do you think we left that part out of the presentation?"
Now, anyone who's seen Augmented Reality will know that it's an utterly inappropriate tool for modeling the spread of a disease. It should instead be used to model people's reactions to an outbreak.
We all knew Starlogo, and we all associated PU with it. Because of this terribly unfortunate association, we thought that's what we were supposed to be doing. Modeling the spread of Avian Flu.

7. We didn't talk about the issues we had. If the adults were going to be blind to the fact that we hadn't even worked towards our goals, well, we'd rather not admit that we failed either. In our presentation we pretended that we had always intended the path that we'd taken. Had we somehow produced a miracle and managed to model the flu with AR, we would have been proud of ourselves and presented that goal, which would have revealed just how ignorant we were of the purpose of AR.
We must have done some hell of a job bullshitting our presentation, because even the adults who didn't have any prior clue got the point that we did not. I discovered this in talking to my father a few days after we got back. He got that the point was to draw out human reactions, not to simulate the spread of anything.
It was so obvious. I told him that that would have been a much better use of AR and we should have presented it that way, but our goal was to model the spread of the disease. He'd thought we knew this and that's where we were going with it. That may have been where we were going, but we certainly didn't know it. Erik's book takes the same point of view as my father, which makes me think my teammates and I may have been the only eight who didn't get it. We were all saying "por que" but some of us meant "why" and some of us meant "because".

8. The best practices of AR Gaming were not shared with us, so we didn't understand the point, and we didn't have anything to start with.
What I mean by this is that we didn't really have a good sense of what had been done with AR before it was given to us. It's like giving someone who doesn't know HTML the code for a webpage but not showing them the page. They might get something out of it, but that something is going to be drastically different than if they saw only the page, or if they saw both the page and the code for it.
What was foggiest, as I've implied, were the goals of the project. What were we supposed to get out of it? We didn't know, so we attached AR to the goals of Agent Based Modeling in Complex Systems (though we may not have called it that), which is essentially successful if you manage to produce something relevant and interesting that speaks for itself. Emergent Behavior.
For other AR games, the goal is to have players present creative and sensitive solutions to whatever problem is set up through the game. The technology is only half of the game where we thought, rightfully, that the point was the technology.
This final step of presentation was never explained to us, so it's almost miraculous that we stumbled upon it on our own at the last minute when deciding how to wrap up our demo session at the park. It was last minute, tacked on, and half-assed. We had no idea that was exactly how they expected us to wrap up. At least, I don't think we had any idea, and I don't think they expected us to wrap up in a different way...

I could say more on that last note, but it gets into subjects I find a bit touchy, and which aren't really relevant to this discussion.