Prospective students visiting Dartmouth will soon have access to the entire campus in the palms of their hands or, more specifically, on the screens of their phones. Over the next month, the Admissions Office will release an application for phones that allows visitors to explore and learn about the College with a virtual aide, according to Senior Assistant Director of Admissions John Beck Jr. '09.
Since approximately 20,000 prospective students visit campus each year, the Admissions Office often has more demand than the admissions officers can handle. The new application will supplement the information offered by tour guides and admissions officers, Beck said.
"We've got a lot of visitors who come to campus and can't make our official tours, and a lot of people who stay longer than the tour and want something to do," he said. "Our campus is also really big, and we can't get them everywhere on a basic one-hour tour."
The Admissions Office began a collaboration with SCVNGR a company that designs "guided treks" for schools and businesses about a year ago to design a virtual tour that would provide visitors with "guidance, context, information and fun," Beck said. The new phone application is based on the idea of "gameification," or layering a game on top of everyday events, he said.
SCVNGR has already helped the Admissions Office design treks around campus with seven different themes libraries, arts, athletics, student life, math and science and social sciences and the humanities, Beck said. Each trek involves challenges that will take visitors to different locations on campus and provide them with information about campus institutions and resources. The new treks will not replace in-person tours, but will instead serve as supplemental options, according to Beck.
"An example of a possible challenge would come from the library tour where we'd have a person walk between the stacks and take a picture," he said. "They'd receive points for completing the challenge and then they'd be provided with a paragraph about Dartmouth's open stack system and how it's unique."
SCVNGR uses "quick response codes," which are virtual bar codes that can be scanned on a phone and guarantee that people are playing and participating, SCVNGR's universities and independent schools specialist Jeff Kirchick said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
The company also provides a content management system that allows the College's Admissions Office to input its own designs for the treks, Kirchick said.
"We provide schools with a platform that lets them go in from scratch and build their own content on top of it," he said. "That way they can build games that appeal to specific audiences and are shaped around their specific campuses."
Because the SCVNGR application was "originally built around text," students who cannot afford smart phones will still be able to participate, Beck said.
"The application itself is free and you can get all the information about the College via text message, without a smart phone," he said. "Additionally, low-income teens are more likely to access the internet over their phone than high-income teens, so we're not shutting out a part of our population by socioeconomic means."
Since SCVNGR's partnerships with colleges and universities usually involve collaboration with more than one department on campus, the Admissions Office initially asked other offices on campus to share the contract, according to Beck. Although no other office agreed to work with SCVNGR, Beck said he was optimistic that the admissions application will encourage other departments and administrators to reconsider using virtual treks as information tools.
"It was really difficult at first to get interest from other people on campus, since this program is so new and unfamiliar, but I can see all sorts of possibilities for this to have huge applicability to other departments," he said. "I could see this working in athletics, orientation, libraries and any number of other places."
The Admissions Office signed a six-month contract with SCVNGR in order to tailor the application to Dartmouth's campus and leave open the possibility of expanding the partnership to other departments, Beck said.
The services SCVNGR provides varies by school and are not limited to admissions tours, Kirchick said.
"We've seen hundreds of different schools use the program in hundreds of different ways," he said. "Cornell University uses it for reunions to invite alumni back and play SCVNGR to re-familiarize themselves with places on campus, and at their Homecoming to allow people to win prizes for having high event attendance."
Although the company has expanded to work with corporations like Coca Cola and IBM, its original focus was on schools similar to Dartmouth, Kirchick said.
"Our CEO was a freshman at Princeton University when he dropped out of college to start the company," he said. "A lot of what he envisioned about the company at the time was about universities, and through the first few years the bulk of our client base was universities."
Working with SCVNGR will also allow the College to present itself as a "technologically savvy destination," Beck said.
"We have this phenomenon at Dartmouth of someone flying into the Boston airport and driving through the woods for two hours," he said. "But once they get here they are in a really innovative place and still get the benefit of existing in a really cool natural environment."