Concept

LIS 697 - Social Media  April 7, 2010
 * Preliminary Project Proposal:** Harwood, Hashimoto, London, Schapiro


 * The Virtual Neighborhood Challenge** - a geotagging adventure program for interacting with the magical mystery world that is your very own block.  The Problem: Children who are 8-12 years old, known as "tweens," are often talked about and frequently marketed to, but are too rarely given meaningful ways to exercise autonomy over the physical and digital worlds that surround them, and almost never encouraged to form links between the several worlds in which they must operate. School, the neighborhood, and social networks all appear as separate realms, and, while tweens exhibit amazing digital literacy in social contexts, opportunities to utilize those skill sets in related educational and community contexts often go unused. The Virtual Neighborhood Challenge will build a bridge between these contexts, creating stimulating, user and educator generated activities that empower tweens to take ownership of their communities, both physical and virtual.

Through augmented reality, to encourage children to understand that they live in a information rich environment and to create interactive digital content for that environment Get young people out into their communities performing real-world activities with digital components, interacting with and taking ownership of local environment
 * Project Goals & Aims:**

The Virtual Neighborhood is designed for varied access use by children ages 8-12. Initially, the project would be tested on a small experimental group of youth who share a physical location, such as a school or public library. Access to the website will require log-in, the creation of an avatar and age verification. An accurate test can only be achieved if the sample group is concentrated in one physical location. Therefore, the initial test group will remain small.
 * Project Audience:**

The platform itself is a game of exploration. Participants are encouraged to go out into the real world and geo-tag real places with with their digital flag. When planting a flag, the user is prompted to design a challenge. When another student comes to that location, either physically with their phone in hand, or on an interactive map on the computer, they are presented with the challenge designed by the first person to plant their flag. When they interact with the flag, the creator and challenger each earn points. When they complete the challenge, they get another flag to plant elsewhere. As points accrue, new features are unlocked on the map, revealing new mysteries, clues, and information about the area, all tagged to the interactive map. The project designers will initially create a framework of 'stories' or 'mysteries,' which the users then supplement and eventually supplant with their own creative quests. A question, or a set of leading protocols, will appear each time they log-in, and any change to the environment requires a verbal component that helps guide others through the change, and enriches the larger world.
 * How does it work?**

Virtual Neighborhoods provides an opportunity for children to re-imagine their usual environment in a fun, flexible, and creative manner, using a real map of their surroundings as a jumping off point for the creation of a personal interactive world where they can learn, re-invent, and explore friendships and places from a different angle that will help them to see the surroundings and challenges of their offline lives in new ways, and provide them with new skills with which to navigate both their online world and its physical counterpart.

This application will piggyback on existing technology, such as googlemaps, foursquare, and ushahidi, to create the platform that will allow kids to operate in a mapped and tagged world.