Hop on the Tram! Broadening the Spaces and Environments of Educational Learning

In the first week of November, the city of Helsinki and its Educational Division collaborated with HundrEd's Innovation Summit creating the celebratory learning event Helsinki Education Week that took place in the daycare centres, schools and educational establishments around the urban and rural areas of the city. Helsinki Education Week, themed Excellence and Equity, had over a hundred events, where our teachers, students and the invite-only guests of the Innovation Summit came together.

Broadening the Spaces and Environments of Learning

As one of the main goals of the Helsinki City's schools this semester is to broaden the space for learning outside the classroom, choosing a tram as one of the event locations was just the thing to do. But like with so many other things, the question how was inconsequential but the important one was what? What should we do in a tram, filled with students, so that it would be meaningful and promote learning in the best way possible?

When planning the content, very quickly the idea of building a Helsinki-themed game that integrates with the concrete surroundings along the tram route. Timo Kuohukoski, an art teacher from the Helsinki Media Arts Upper Secondary School, is well known for using a digital map-based gaming application called Seppo in his pedagogy, so I contacted him and we hit it off quite instantly and shared a very similar vision on what we wanted to

1. The tram "Ludde" 2. Tickets served many purposes: they were used to divide the students into teams, access the game code and to enable interaction with the ticket inspectors that held essential key to one of the tasks.3. Students worked in teams combining their knowledge and skills to solve the tasks. 4. Even parents were included: one of the students asked help from her father with tricky dialectal task.

Playing an Educational Game - How to Make the Best of It?

I think a few words about the game itself is necessary, since it has a strong pedagogical background and it was designed for educational purposes from the beginning (actually by one of the city's own teachers, Riku Alkio). The browser-based map game, Seppo, let's one build a game with a wide variety of tasks in any location, indoors or outdoors. The idea is that the map of the selected area, which in our case was the tram route in Helsinki, works as the game board. And since the game is now available to all the schools in Helsinki, it was a great way to launch the use of Seppo by building a game placed along one of the tram lines.

It was important to Timo and I, to make the game super-immersive and to use the possibilities offered by the game platform, the tram and our surroundings creatively as possible. Somewhere along the planning and preparing we had to kill some of our darlings due to time limitations - like the idea of using the city's huge digital advertisement boards along the route. Luckily, most of the ideas were executable and Timo was, for example, able to recruit two of his students as ticket inspectors that hopped on the tram at the exactly right time and place.

Well, let's look into the concrete setting that we had

When we announced the game event the previous week, we scoped it to high school students, so kids from 14 to 16 year-olds. Very quickly, we received two interested teachers and their student groups, one that were 9th graders and the other one that were 7th graders. We told the teachers that the game would be played in small teams of 3-4 students and it would be enough if one of the students could use their mobile phone* to play the game. *In Finland, the students are allowed and encouraged to use their phones in educational settings for learning.

Learning by doing

Excited and a bit nervous, we arrived at the tram stop nearby the Helsinki Railway Station on Tuesday morning around 9 o'clock to find out that the tram was even way cooler in its antiqueness than expected and everything pretty much worked as we thought it would. The students arrived half an hour later as scheduled and everyone seemed eager to get going. I stayed on the tram with a colleague, Kristian, running the basics of the game and guiding students, meanwhile Timo went to a secret spot in the center to lead the game. Timo's role was to monitor the game and assess the answers given by the teams in real-time.

We couldn't rehearse the game on the tram beforehand but Timo did ride along the route to check the timing and other factors. Due to his amazing planning and preparing, the game worked like magic! Of course, there were things that we could have not anticipated, which we noticed on the first round of playing and thus, were able to adjust the game accordingly on the second time around. The following notions included:

• The group should be three students instead of four, since they were playing using only one small mobile phone screen.

• Instructions play an essential role and learning from the first round, we clearly did not stress enough on the first round that in this game, time is not essential but the quality of the answers is. So, on the second round, I made it a more important to instruct the students that the quality of answers would be elemental in winning the game.

• The more excited you are, the more excited the students will be. Creating an immersive gaming experience in an unexpected environment, like a tram, requires good facilitation. On the second round, it was easier for me to run the game in a more excited way, since I had already done it once and had experience on what was about to come and how to guide the students to do what they do best: shine!