At the University of New Mexico (U.S.), some students in second-year Spanish classes become detectives. They travel to Los Griegos, an Albuquerque neighborhood 15 minutes northwest of the campus, on a mission: Clear the names of four families accused of conspiring to murder a local resident. It’s a fictional murder mystery, and instead of guns and badges, the students are armed with PDAs, which are provided by the university. When students enter their location into the wireless handheld devices, a clue might turn up: a bloody machete, for example, or a virtual character who may converse with them—in Spanish—about a suspect. Los Griegos and the language skills needed to navigate the locale are no fiction, however. By integrating mobile computing and actual surroundings, the educational game, Mentira—Spanish for “lie” and a reference to the claim of conspiracy the students are assigned to debunk—helps take teaching to a new place outside the classroom: “augmented reality.” While video and computer games are commonly criticized for isolating players from reality, augmented-reality developers who work in higher education see the technology as a way to accomplish just the opposite.Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education