Topic 3 - Augmented reality, gaming and mobile computing

Mobile computing research

Mobile gaming categories, examples and recent statistics

Action and adventure, Sports, Racing, Music, Strategy and Simulation, Brain training, Boards and cards, Arcade, Puzzle and Sexy are the list of categories provided on Gameloft website who is the winner of 2009 Global mobile awards 2009 in best mobile game category.

A highly commended game in the best game category is AvaPeeps and the game is categorised as social entertainment.

There is a wide range of game categories available in the market. As popularity grows these categories would even expand further.

A recent article on Businessweek lists there are more than 1500 games on Apples iTunes App Store compared to 300 titles for Sony PSP and about 600 titles for Nintendo DS.

In terms of sales units Nintendo has sold 42 million DS consoles from January 2007 to June 2008 and Apple is predicted to sell 40 million units easily according to the same article Apple: Soon to be a mobile gaming force

Interms of using mobile games and the benefit to education seems to be quite possitive. Particularly incorporating video, sound, sms & being able to access the content at students own time seems to be proving more apealing than the traditional education delivery modes and classroom environments. Being able to select a difficulty level of the game by the player/student also provides a challenge to the students and seems to have an encouraging effect for students to improve and pursue more difficult problems.

A report produced by Birmingham university Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning describes the findings of many case studies done categorised into different activities involved with mobile technologies.

The report describes a mathematics video game called Skills Arena which is implemented using a Nintendo Gameboy Advance system which provides addition and subtraction problems as a game. The game also has a difficulty level which can be selected by the student and the study found an average 1,296 problems completed by each student during the test period which was three times higher than using the traditional work sheets.