What is the MAGE system?

MAGE (Mobile Active Gaming Environment) serves as a vehicle for teaching system design skills in electrical and computer engineering. It is a framework for designing hardware and software that will be incorporated into a live-action multi-player game. The game, in its current form, is similar to laser tag, but with a wide variety of ‘weapons’ that are built by students. These weapons cast, absorb, and even reflect spells using infra-red, RFID, or RF, and they interface with a wearable computer that communicates with the game server and database.

Students design, build and test the hardware and the software, and are responsible for interfacing with the MAGE system. Thus, they not only learn and apply important designing, testing, and debugging skills, but are also trained to work within an existing system with its design constraints. They work in cooperative teams that foster collaboration rather than competition.

Contextualizing design around a framework of games provides a context for design that is both well-understood by the target audience of undergraduates and has been empirically demonstrated to engage and motivate students regardless of gender, race, or socio-economic background. It is grounded in a socio-constructivist theoretical framework of how students learn design, informed by previous work on design learning, and builds on an existing capstone design course that has fostered significant learning gains in system design.

The long-term vision of the project is to design a national competition where teams at different levels (middle and high schools, colleges, universities and even professionals and hobbyists) can compete in a real-time live-action game played at the National Mall at Washington D. C. during the USA Science and Engineering Festival.