Location-based Mobile Application Creator creating educational mobile scavenger hunts

Using mobile devices for entertainment, knowledge transfer, and learning has been an important development in recent years. The use of mobile games as pedagogical tools has also become more and more popular. The mobility of the devices can enhance applications with location-based information. Why not combine these aspects to create mobile, location-based learning games to make users aware of their environment? In this paper we introduce an online tool for easily creating such an application, which combines teaching, gaming, and location-based information. First, we briefly present the Location-based Mobile Application Creator (LMAC), a framework for creating different mobile location-aware applications. Then, we introduce an application created with LMAC in more detail: a game-based scavenger hunt for children enabling them to learn facts about the city of Graz, Austria. Similar to a traditional scavenger hunt, users are able to gather geo-referenced information with mobile phones and learn about the environment in a playful way. With LMAC, teachers can easily create individual scavenger hunts adapted to the current subject matter.