Toponimo: A Geosocial Pervasive Game for English Second Language Learning

This paper provides an overview of progress on the Toponimo project, a geosocial game for learning simple, location significant vocabulary. At the core, the technology relies on a crowd-sourced database of individual words which are ‘linked’ to physical locations via GPS data. A simple scoring system awards players for collecting and adding words to their environment. When adding words to the shared database, the player also has the option of adding other media such as images and sound files which will be associated with that location. This core mechanic can be expanded upon by a plug-in architecture which allows mini-games to be built ‘on top’ of the core game engine. We expect that these games will present rich opportunities for learners to acquire and rehearse vocabulary.