Suspense is a key emotion to engage players in game-based learning. With their proposed Black Cloud digital learning curriculum, Niemeyer and his team aim to bring suspense to environmental studies in high schools. The Black Cloud curriculum is organized around an Alternate Reality game in which students track down wireless air quality sensors. From July 6 to August 15, students at Manual Arts High School are playing and learning Black Cloud. These sensors are hidden in the students’ neighborhood at environmentally critical locations. To discover the hidden air quality sensors, students must learn to read graphs and associate air quality data with human activities in specific locations and develop an understanding of the emission landscape in their neighborhood. During the search, students post reports to the game website, including interviews with residents, songs, and images, to document socio-economic elements of pollution online.
In a farewell ceremony on August 15, 2008, students attempt to chase the Black Cloud out of their homes, schools and neighborhoods. The students who contribute the most to the game receive Black Cloud Monitor awards, which include a small grant towards pollution abatement. The game combines sophisticated site-specific air quality sensing, gameplay, cellphone network transmissions, posts to a collaborative website, and community interaction to open the students’ process of learning, discovery and transformation to a broader community and to real-time environmental concerns in the students’ own neighborhood.
In a second version, people living near Echo Park, Los Angeles, can play the Black Cloud from August 23 to August 30 at the Machine Project Gallery. The Machine Project version involves a class where participants learn to build sensor circuits, and a period of one week in which gallery visitors can find a set of 12 missing sensors.
In the period of the DML grant the Black Cloud organizers plan to run the game twice, once in South Central Los Angeles, USA and once in Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt. The organizers selected the two locations because of extraordinary local emissions, and because of their vicinity to collaborating schools. The Cairo portion of the project is called www.alokadalkhadraa.org, or "Green Nodes".
Black Cloud is inspired by Alternate Reality games such as World without Oil, by dramatic collaborative performances such as Continuous City and by teaching transformation rather than information.
A full version of the project in pdf form is here.
Our team includes Aida Eltorie, the Arts Manager for Black Cloud in Cairo, Egypt, Antero Garcia, a teacher at Manual Arts High School, Daye Rogers, our videographer, and the UC Berkeley crew: Greg Niemeyer, Laura Greig, Nik Hanselmann, and Farley Gwazda.
Here are some links to different elements of the game:
Here are some project related links that inspire us: