John Martin is a doctoral student in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With a background in technology, art, writing, and outdoor education, and with a commitment to environmental and social sustainability, he investigates tools of inquiry and expression that promote a greater understanding and appreciation of the social and physical space(s) we inhabit.

Since 1993, he has helped run a wilderness camp in Maine. There he noticed that when people actively engage their bodies in personally and culturally meaningful physical places, they can learn a lot. So in order to meld his research with his passion for the camp, he researches Augmented Reality Games that use GPS-enabled handheld computers to physically and socially situate players in culturally meaningful (and geographically real) game space.

The Mystery Trip is based on a theatrically-enhanced camping trip "played" at the camp in the 1920s and 1930s, where campers followed the trails of forgers, kidnappers, and thieves in the woods around the camp, finding clues, breaking codes, solving puzzles, and improvising in order to find the gold coins buried by the bad guys (then they'd peel the gold off the coins and eat the chocolate). The clues and characters are virtual -- triggered by GPS -- but the space real. As a twist to the original game, in the down time of the three-day period of the game, campers designed a "better" game for the concurrent trips to experience. This additional step further enhanced their sense of place, as it required that they look at the space they explored through the perspective of game designer/producers as well as game consumers.

He invites you to check out more of his research.

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