What is AMICITIAS?
AMICITIAS is a language and culture based, serious game project. The game can be played using mobile devices, in six real-world locations throughout Europe – Bradford, Barcelona, Madrid, Sicily, Sardinia and Galway. AMICITIAS is an acronym for “Ambient Intelligence as a Compelling Instructional Tool for Inter-linguistic and Intercultural Skills”. This is a bit of a mouthful, so we call it “Ami” for short.
The project involves teams of international researchers, teachers and programmers whose goal is to improve the linguistic, gestural and cultural knowledge of players, within specific locations. We aim for the users to acquire skills necessary to accomplish challenging game tasks, both within the mobile application and also whilst exploring interesting spaces and places within the cities.
The project integrates language learning into the process of playing and discovering, using the mobile game as a part of this process.
This is an organic, living research project and through the process of development, these goals are morphing and expanding. Many of the documents available from this site are very much in progress. Feedback and suggestions for collaborations are very welcome.
The Bradford contribution, in addition to designing the content for the local game, is to produce the technical underpinnings, programming and technology, as well as media-based gaming concepts. This is being led by lecturers David Robison and Gil Harel, Peter McClory of Panoetic, and programmers Xiayou Tan and Ranjan Kulkarni. This takes place as part of the overall project, which is headed by Javier Díaz (Dept. of Modern Languages, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) involving partners in educational institutions and technology innovation organisations in Europe.
You have arrived at the project’s blog pages. The official pages will soon be found at www.amicitias.com (site under construction). This blog is maintained by the the School of Computing, Informatics and Media project team, based in The University of Bradford in the UK. Send feedback on this site to d.robison ‘at’ bradford.ac.uk.
The AMICITIAS Project has been funded with the support of the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.