Fieldtrip Films
In 2007, we build an online community of 70 teenagers and 7 teenage filmmakers. The filmmakers applied for, and had been chosen to receive, high-end cell phone video cameras (donated by Nokia) to create video journals about anything they thought significantly impacted their journey toward adulthood. They worked with a team of professional filmmakers to learn as much as possible about how to liberate their voices and get to what they really cared most deeply about.
Then, in four short weeks they collaborated with a team of video editors to produce 76 short films. The films were posted on the FieldtripFilms website where the other teenage members of the Fieldtrip web community could watch, reflect and comment on the films. The site was designed to equally serve verbal, visual and social cognitive styles of members. (See the “Screenshots” post under the Fieldtrip Films category to the right).
Even though community members could have simply ignored the films and the site and still gotten iTunes rewards used as incentives to join, they watch the films and were engaged on a meaningful level--posting 450 comments during the month-long pilot. Importantly, the films were not frivolous or easy entertainment, they were about things that really matter, and the dialogs they prompted were about everything from relationships with mothers to social justice to the experience of school.
And this is the key. The films and the site refuted the common teen social networking experience that tends to avoid talking about the most pressing, important and sometimes painful aspects of becoming adult in favor of relative frivolity. It worked. We've discovered there’s a need out there. To make it safe, it was monitored and facilitated by faculty researcher-advised undergraduate students from our university, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The widely interdisciplinary team of researchers working on this project (see the category: Research Team to the right) has built fine-grained data collection into this site with the permission of its members. They are using analyzing themes that emerged in preparation for a report back to the National Institute for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health, which gave partial funding to the project. The other major funder is the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.
Open the “Forethoughts” post in the About category to the right to see the foundational concepts this is all based on.
See an overview documentary with Project Founder, Lee Boot, and some of the films by clicking on the Fieldtrip Films category to the right.
Fieldtrip Game
A few months later, we in the Imaging Research Center at UMBC (the key group behind this project) went to the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to give a sneak preview of the prototype of their new game, Noetic.
Noetic is a multi-player game for Xbox and PCs in which players arrive in the decaying infrastructure of a dying consumerist world in which the party that would never end is still going on—barely. Among the rubble, they discover mini-games that test their music-making, unicycle-steering and logic abilities. Upon succeeding in each they are presented with parts of masks, which unite to form a whole mask and permit entry into a gated area. There they discover a vehicle, which requires all that the diverse skills in the mini-games be applied simultaneously and collaboratively by at least 3 players in order to drive. They take the vehicle out of the city, across the barrier and the desert beyond to a new world, which they will build.
The concept behind the game is to provide a world where players are valued for whatever unique combination of strengths their mind has, rather than the comparatively narrow and predetermined range of strengths emphasized in most games and in most school experiences for that matter. Loosely based on Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, the game keeps a constant database of players evolving achievements and rewards them with wearable accessories that are symbols others can decode to understand a players strengths for recruitment onto teams.
Play is eclectic ranging from growing crops to zombie killing and barbecuing. The team is seeking funding for the alpha version. See the “Noetic Screenshots” post in the Fieldtrip Game category to the right.