Ingress: A Game Ripe with Educational Possibilities

For the past several months I've been testing my wife's patience with a game from Google called Ingress.  Ingress is an augmented reality massively multiplayer online game.  The game uses your Android or iOS device's GPS to show you an augmented view of the world around you; this world has portals that look very much like fountains of light erupting from local points of interest like public works of art, monuments, cenotaphs, popular hangout spots, etc.

Two world-wide teams vie for control of these portals (and the future of all mankind) using game mechanics that I won't get into here, except to state that the goal of the game is to link portals together to create large triangular fields.  The area of these fields are constantly totaled and the team with the combined greatest area of triangles is winning at that moment.

Richmond as seen by someone Ingressing.  The points
are portals and the shaded areas are triangular fields.

It seems simple enough, just make big triangles on a map by standing on a portal and linking it to two other portals that you've been to before and that are already connected thus completing the three sides of a triangle.  However, the lines connecting the vertexes of triangles cannot intersect any other lines.  This makes making longer lines far more difficult.

Since the app will only show you portals within about two kilometers of your current location, creating large triangular fields require either a lot of luck or careful planning and teamwork.  Fortunately, a Smurf or a Frog (colloquial names for members of the blue Resistance and green Enlightened teams respectively) can see real-time maps by visiting ingress.com/intel to plan their "ingressions".  They can also join online communities that work as teams to create huge fields and/or destroy the opposing team's fields.


This game and its educational possibilities has been under my "Learning-by-Gaming" radar until recently. While this game has been out for several years in one form or another for Android devices, it was released for iOS (my current mobile platform) on the 14th of July of this year.  Walking and driving about town playing this game got me thinking about geometry and trigonometry and ways that Ingress can engage students to learn about both.  Fortunately, it's also motivated other scholars to do the same.  Trever Reeh is one such scholar.  His article Math Techniques and Strategies: Ingress and Math suggests several ways that educators can utilize Ingress such as determining the areas of the triangular fields created on a given map pulled from ingress.com/intel or cross-curricular learning since portals are objects of historical or cultural significance.

Ingress is a game ripe with possibilities for educators.