This paper describes a recent program for game-based learning within a mixed-reality environment, the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab [SMALLab]. In the program, our research team collaborated with a 9 th grade Language Arts teacher to design and deliver a new learning game and associated curriculum. Through the process of game-design and game-play, students advance their understanding of metaphor. We outline the theoretical basis upon which design decisions were made, and describe the rationale for choosing Language Arts as the subject area for this program.Three goals structure our research: (1) to advance students' understanding of literary devices with an emphasis on metaphor;(2) to engage otherwise under-performing students through gamebased learning that is student-centered, collaborative, and based in reflective practice; and (3) to demonstrate effective game-based learning using a mixed-reality platform in a conventional classroom context. Twenty-four students attending a large suburban high school in the southwest United States participated in this learning experience once a week for seven weeks during the Fall of 2007. Our data indicates that these students attained a more globally coherent model of metaphor in the course of their participation, that they found both the game-design and the gameplay process stimulating and rewarding, and that, given the necessary scaffolding, a mixed-reality learning environment can be effectively employed to teach standards-based curriculum in a conventional high school classroom.

We present concurrent theoretical work from HCI and Education that reveals a convergence of trends focused on the importance of three themes: embodiment, multimodality, and composition. We argue that there is great potential for truly transformative work that aligns HCI and Education research, and posit that there is an important opportunity to advance this effort through the full integration of the three themes into a theoretical and technological framework for learning. We present our own work in this regard, introducing the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab (SMALLab). SMALLab is a mixed-reality environment where students collaborate and interact with sonic and visual media through full-body, 3D movements in an open physical space. SMALLab emphasizes human-to-human interaction within a multimodal, computational context. We present a recent case study that documents the development of a new SMALLab learning scenario, a collaborative student participation framework, a student-centered curriculum, and a three-day teaching experiment for seventy-two earth science students. Participating students demonstrated significant learning gains as a result of the treatment. We conclude that our theoretical and technological framework can be broadly applied in the realization of mixed reality, student-centered learning environments.

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