ArGO. Archaeological Geocaching Online Teaching and Learning Archaeology with Geocaching
Michael Remmy
Abstract Digital media has influenced the viewing and learning habits of students for the past decades. At the same time teaching habits in archaeology have not changed to the same extent: frontal teaching and lectures are often seen as best practice. Therefore teachers in universities should also apply new methods and didactics to their curriculum to engage students in diverse learning settings. One approach is ArGO (Archaeological Geocaching Online) - an e-learning tool for students of archaeology that is currently being developed at the Archaeological Institute and the Humanities Computer Science at the University of Cologne. The main goal is to design virtual geocaching quests that students have to solve by using mobile devices on an archaeological site. On the one hand this allows the students to use their expertise in digital media while learning archaeological facts. On the other hand new impulses are given through the change of the learning environment and the use of self organized learning. The development of ArGO is split up into two phases where each development phase focuses different groups of student learners: The first phase took place in the winter term 2015 / 2016 and engaged students of both institutes to focus on the Roman city of Cologne (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium). In three different groups the students researched various aspects of a Roman city (e.g. infrastructure, politics, religion) and transferred archaeological information into virtual caches. These virtual caches are presented in form of mobile-friendly web-based games which consist of quizzes, quests and minigames. Teaching methods such as clustering, project learning and evaluation of the different project sections were used to get the best possible learning outcome. The accompanying website http://www.argo.uni-koeln.de documents the progression of the seminar and backs up all results including the source codes of the developed web- and mobile- applications built with state of the art web-technologies. In the second phase the outcome of the individual students’ project work will be the basis for further endeavors in offering a mobile-friendly learning- and teaching-environment called ArGO. The talk will illustrate the developments and results of the first teaching phase. It will also give an outlook on the second phase and possible fields of application.
