In early February 2020, after a renovation lasting about three years, the Yunnan Garden at the Nanyang Technological University re-opened to the public. We were interested to design a game-based learning environment around a garden at a university campus. The garden was built in the 1950s and spans nine hectares. The renovated garden features clusters of floral species along the water course of a rain-garden – the latter is a bioretention facility designed to treat polluted stormwater run-off, by using plants and differentiated layers of soil to increase infiltration of water which would otherwise pond on the surface. As for the clusters of floral species, they are accompanied by text-based signboards which describe the significance of the various species to the heritage of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, in cultural terms such as medicinal use, use in textiles, and so on.

We were interested to explore the extent to which a communally shared environmental resource – of ecological, geographical and historical worth – might still be enjoyed and explored during a socio-cultural milieu of limited access and safe-distancing. We were motivated to do so because several city-based universities around the world have similar large park-like spaces are potentially rich communal nodes of learning and interaction between town and gown; examples include the campuses of the University of California at Berkeley and of the National Tsinghua University. Indeed, the approach might be equally applied to public open spaces independent of universities, such as Central Park, Manhattan, and Boston Common.

We designed a learning activity using Augmented Reality which sought to take advantage of the implicit potential for learning about history and culture which the Yunnan Garden represents, so as to afford visitors a scaffolded experience as they explore the garden. We call our activity Yunnan Rangers. This scaffolded experience comprises a game-driven narrative in which visitors to the garden may assume the roles of different protagonists.

In the context of visitors to the actual site of the garden, game-play through this activity took the form of the players exploring the trails on quests aligned with their respective character roles. They obtained information at points along the trails through 360-degree photos pushed by a location-aware service to their handhelds / smartphones. An example of such a quest might be – in the role of the doctor – to learn about herbs which might be used as soothing balms.

In addition, we also sought to design a paper-based board-game for visitors who are not yet able to visit the garden in person. For those times during which visits to the Yunnan Garden may neither be possible nor practicable, in the parallel context of players of the board-game-based iteration of the activity, they would participate in similar quests, scanning Augmented Reality codes on cards drawn in the course of game-play; players would need to decide if and how to use the information from the cards to advance their progress in the game. The layout of the board-game approximately mimics that of the actual garden, and Augmented Reality is used to complement game-play by providing the player(s) with supplemental information as they advance through the game.

Yunnan Rangers was designed in collaboration with Wong Yuk Yi, and has been incorporated as part of the compulsory Postgraduate Diploma in Education course - the Singapore Kaleidoscope - at the National Institute of Education.