Books are great tools to aiding learning and imagination, but is it possible to use technology in such a way that children might actually experience something like the African savannah for themselves? Savannah, a strategy-based adventure game mapping a virtual space onto a real one, was developed with just such an ambitious aim.

The understanding that game- and role-play can be effective educational tools has long been accepted, but in coming up with the idea of Savannah, a game in which a virtual space (the African savannah) would be mapped onto a real space (a Bristol school’s playing field), research and development organisation Futurelab aimed to take the concept to new levels, ones that would incorporate a number of new and unproven objectives.

As Jo Morrison, creative director at Futurelab explains: ‘We were very interested in whether the appealing and motivating aspects of computer gameplay could be harnessed and transposed into a mixed reality experience. The initial concept was developed in-house, then conversations took place with the BBC’s Natural History Unit and staff at Hewlett Packard working on the Mobile Bristol Initiative to see if they were interested in developing the notion of an augmented reality game where children collaborated when role-playing lions in a savannah.’

In the game, children move around a real space with GPS-linked PDAs, pretending to be a pride of lions which has to survive a year in the savannah. As they move around, the children/lions encounter hotspots where they can smell, hear and see objects (prey, predators etc) on their screens, and the computers link them to each other so that they can work together and communicate information both to each other and to an interactive whiteboard in ‘the den’ which monitors their progress.

Read full story