This week’s Times Education Supplement (January 19, 2018) contains an article on edTech at UCL.
The article features a lengthy mention of the Playing the Archive project taken from discussions with Professor Andrew Burn, the project’s PI. Find out more about Playing the Archive and the projects taking place in the Knowledge Lab here.
Over at CASA, Valerio Signorelli has been developing prototypes for Augmented Reality play. Playing the Archive will bring to life the play experiences of children in the 1950s and 1960s captured in the Opie archive and make it available to visitors at the V&A Museum of Childhood and the Weston Park Museum in Sheffield. AR technologies will also inform the development of experimental play spaces in Sheffield and London.
In this video, Valerio showcases an early prototype of ‘sonic hopscotch’, which uses documents and audio recordings from the Opie Archive as well as a video recording taken as part of the Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age project. (Note that as this is a prototype, the recordings and the game don’t yet tie together: the audio and video are for a clapping game, while the document describes a game played using cigarette cards.)
The Playing the Archive team recently visited the Olympic Park in Stratford to scope out play spaces. We looked at cafés and outdoor spaces, and focused especially closely on existing playgrounds at the site.
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We hope to use mixed reality to make novel connections between the physical and digital environments, pulling through archival materials from the Opie and Museum of Childhood collections with the hope of bringing the songs, games and play of previous generations to life. (You can find out more about this strand of the project here.) Discussions about potential uses of the space will continue over the coming weeks and months.
Playing the Archive 