Progress Report ArchaeoTrail course
So, a while ago I posted about a new ArchaeoTrail course that I am giving, where students create ArchaeoTrails through Roman Cologne. Well, a couple of weeks ago, the semester ended and we had a look at the nearly done ArchaeoTrails and I have to say: Impressive!
What was the premise?
So I reported a while back that three groups of students wanted to created three trails through Roman Cologne: a trail for kids, a trail for tourists and a trail for professionals. Recently, we tested the trail in the field and I was part of the group that tested the kids tour.
In the end, there will be even a fourth tour with a focus on churches in Cologne. Additionally, we want to create the tours not only in German, but also in English. At least one of the tours will also get a translation into Greek, which is quiet fun I guess. There is also the idea to present the tourist tour in a different form in easy language and we are thinking about how to implement that (maybe as a form of translation)?
What did the students show in the ArchaeoTrail course?
So we did go though every tour and stop and talked a lot about consistency, story-telling, fact-checking and especially about the length of these trails. The kids trail for example is already nearly two hours long. As we tested, we actually had a kid with us (my son), who rated the tour very positively. The tour for professionals is more of a 5-6 hour activity and we think it might be suitable for university excursions or the like.
Students are also taking care of images and image rights as these are very important things when making something publicly available. For the kids tour, the trail offers a hand drawn protagonist “Agrippina” and her dog, which lead through the trail. Other images are reconstructions or photos made by the students themselves. Great work!
How will we proceed?
So now the students have two more months to finish the trails. There is not much more to do actually, as they are waiting for some image permissions. We also decided, that some trails can be shortened. We will give each trail a final check. Then, we send it off to the creators of the app to check the trails thoroughly. This last check is meant to secure a scientific sound trail that is actually fitting into the concept of ArchaeoTrail.
I am pretty confident that the trails will end up great. As soon as they are published online, I will certainly make sure to write about it.
