Immersive Game Technologies for Innovative Education:A Method for Experimental Interdisciplinary Technology Transfer

Immersive, sensor-enabled technologies such as augmented and virtual reality expand the way human beings interact with computers significantly. While these technologies are widely explored in entertainment games, they also offer possibilities for educational use. However, their uptake in education is so far very limited. Within the ImTech4Ed project, we aim at systematically exploring the power of interdisciplinary, international hackathons as a novel method to create immersive educational game prototypes and as a means to transfer these innovative technical prototypes into educational use. To achieve this, we bring together game design and development, where immersive and interactive solutions are designed and developed; computer science, where the technological foundations for immersive technologies and for scalable architectures for these are created; and teacher education, where future teachers are educated. This article reports on the concept and design of these hackathons