One of our first forays into designing pervasive technologies to support active learning was the Ambient Wood project that ran in 2003. Various wireless and sensor technologies, devices and representational media were combined, designed and choreographed to appear and be used in a physical woodland. The idea was to enable children (aged 10-12 years) to integrate, build and reflect upon their classroom learning for the topic of habitat distributions and interdependencies through their explorations of an 'ambient' wood; whereby various digital augmentations collected and experienced in the context of the physical woodland would provide them with the means of achieving this.

Several handcrafted listening, recording and viewing devices were created to present the digital augmentations, making the invisible visible and the inaudible audible, while also bringing the far to the near, and seeing the past and the future in the present. The digital augmentations comprised sounds of biological processes, images of organisms and video clips of life cycles: some were triggered by the children's exploratory movements, others were collected by the children, while still others were aggregated and represented as composite information visualisations of their exploratory behaviour. A wireless infrastructure also monitored the children's positions in the woodland, tracking the location and data the children collected, and triggering location-based information. Examples of the tools included: a PDA display that popped up images of a plant or animal together with a voice-over describing an aspect of its habitat, whenever the children passed by a motion sensor strategically placed in different parts of the wood (eg, next to a thistle); a probe tool that enabled the children to take real-time measurements of moisture and light anywhere in the woodland; and an ambient horn that played various ambient sounds that were again triggered whenever the children walked past location-based sensors embedded in the environment. The children were also given walkie-talkies to communicate their findings and observations and to answer questions sometimes asked by a remote facilitator. The remote facilitator also sent images back to them that then appeared on their PDAs of what he/she thought they were describing.
 
 
 
Pairs of children explored different parts of the physical woodland and used the various tools and devices. They probed many aspects of the woodland (including themselves!), taking it in turns to either probe or read the outcome on the PDA. They also used the tools to initiate scientific inquiry. For example, one pair used the probe tool to generate hypotheses about why certain parts were drier (eg, leaves) than others (eg, grass) and what this meant in relation to what would survive there. Thus, the children were able to link the information appearing on their devices with what they had previously learnt, together with what they were seeing and hearing in the environment, enabling them to develop a deeper understanding of the various habitat relationships and distributions.

To build up their learning further, the children were later given the opportunity to revisit the data they had collected and observed by viewing it on a large bird's eye digital visualisation of the woodland. This was presented via a large screen display placed in a tent in the middle of the wood. In particular, their recorded light and moisture readings were displayed as visualisations on a map, enabling the children to see collective distributions of their probe readings. All the children were fascinated that every probe reading they and the other children had collected had been recorded and was now available to them as interactive data points on the visualisation display. By clicking on the data points the children could bring up the same readings they had seen on their PDAs whilst in the woodland. This combined ground level/bird's eye level mapping proved to be a very powerful representation for encouraging reflection: by seeing each other's data from the two different perspectives, the children developed an overall picture in relation to their own personal experiences and were able to make generalisations about the contrasting habitats. It was also found to be highly amusing, especially when the children tried to find the data points of where they had probed parts of their bodies.

The digital data and information collected, heard and viewed in the woodland was again re-represented in a classroom setting to support further reflections about the interdependencies in the woodland habitats. This time the information was back projected onto a shared horizontal surface. The children used their digital data to begin to build representations of ecosystems using physical tokens of the organisms found in particular locations in the wood. This helped them think about the habitat distributions and interdependencies experienced in the woodland at a more conceptual level, supporting a full circle of abstract to concrete to abstract understanding via the interlinking of physical and digital spaces.
 
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