The third phase of the project, the collection of photo data for the map, was my favorite. During this phase, Eric and I conducted a research game that allowed us to learn more about specific areas of the community that had sparked our interest in focus groups.
The research game was inspired by an activity called geocaching, a high-tech treasure hunt in which players go online, retrieve the coordinates of a geocache or prize someone else has hidden in an interesting place, and then use a GPS unit to navigate to it. We recruited 80 kids from 8 schools to play our game. At each school 10 youths were divided into two teams. Each team was given GPS units with preprogrammed geographic points. They were told to find the points, using the GPS device as a compass, logging and taking pictures of places that fell into certain categories along the way.
The categories included:
A.) places where people have sex
B.) places where people do drugs
C.) places to have fun
D.) places to buy things for your family
E.) important places in the community
Youths used sophisticated cell phones- cameras called Nokia N95s to take the photos. The camera was capable of attaching the latitude and longitude of the location where the photo was taken to the photo itself. Whichever team had the most photos won! When the teams finished, we would all sit down together and go over the log they kept, which showed the categories each photo fell into—to make sure we had all the information recorded correctly. A video of one of the photo debriefings we had is below: