OrientaTree: A Mobile Tool for Geolocated Educational Orienteering

Abstract

Orienteering has long been used in physical education due to its recognized benefits for perceptual-motor capacity, as a tool for safe and efficient movement and as a recreational activity. It also helps in the acquisition of skills in multiple domains besides physical education, such as geography, mathematics, or biology. Many teachers use this interdisciplinary nature of orienteering, complementing it with educational tasks at each control point, and using geolocation and mobile devices to avoid the cumbersome tasks related to the setting up and dismantling of physical circuits. However, the systems that allow this kind of geolocated educational orienteering activities have some limitations in their implementation of the elements of orienteering or in the educational possibilities for teachers to configure and monitor learning situations that can adapt to their learning goals. To address these challenges, this article proposes a set of design requirements to create geolocated educational orienteering systems and a mobile tool, OrientaTree, created following the said requirements. A prototype of OrientaTree has been evaluated by means of a feature analysis and a pilot study involving five teachers and 115 students. The results of the evaluation provide evidence that OrientaTree overcomes the limitations of alternative reviewed approaches to conduct geolocated educational orienteering activities. However, it could be improved to allow more configuration capabilities to permit teachers to better adapt activities to their learning goals.