1. Playfields: Designing tools for playful fieldwork [60 mins]

Jana Wendler
Perkins, C.

The Erasmus+ funded GoGoGozo is a unique interdisciplinary field course. It brings together students from 8 disciplines and 4 countries on the island of Gozo (Malta). In teams, the students research Gozo as an island using playful approaches and methods. Students and staff engage in a range of games and playful encounters, from a hybrid location-based game to open-ended dérives, challenging conventional ideas of research and field learning. Drawing on our experiences from the first year of the course in 2014/15, and related research projects on mobile mapping and playful methods, we are now going a step further and have started work on a Proof of Concept (PoC). The idea behind the PoC is to design a digital tool for playful fieldwork for a range of different courses.

For this workshop, we invite you to become part of the design team – or if you prefer, its critic. Situated in our observations and evaluations from last year’s fieldcourse, we will discuss, create, dispute, enact and play with ideas around technology for playful field work. What tools do we need for more playful learning? How can we bring together innovative pedagogy and geographical awareness of the field? What role does technology have within this? And how should our technological tools look and feel to be relevant and exciting for students, as well as being well-grounded in playful pedagogical principles?

As this is primarily a design project, we are employing design principles in the way we approach the PoC. One of them is to start with a design brief, which outlines the problem and goals. In that spirit, we present below the project brief, modified for this session. We hope you take on the challenge!

Problem

Conventional course structures for social science and humanities fieldwork are frequently limited in their approach. While fieldwork is seen as a key experience in many disciplines, and students are often asked to complete a distinct project, there is surprisingly little room for holistic, reflective and innovative learning. Further, technology has rarely been deployed in a critical way for the purpose of fieldwork. These discrepancies are reflected in: – a rigid definition of instructor and learner roles, – a fragmentary fieldwork experience, with student-centred work decoupled from – staff input and over-arching pedagogical goals – a misalignment of how students use tools, technologies and methods in daily life, as opposed to their use in field pedagogy. We contend that this is partly caused by a lack of suitable tools and methods.

Goals

The goal is to implement playful methods in a fieldwork context, through an online platform and connected mobile app which will facilitate links between:

  • reflexive teaching and learning,
  • place and the field,
  • students and teachers,
  • process and outcomes.

These links should encourage collaboration, ownership, transformation and subversion. They should reframe the relation between learners and instructors in a digital age.

Aspirations

To build a playful toolkit for teaching and learning in the field. This should:

  • work and be fit for purpose.
  • be close in looks and function to (and interoperable with) apps deployed in student lifestyles
  • be adaptable to different fieldwork situations and student levels
  • offer integration between different modes of learning (personally, in small groups, as a wider collective and with teachers)
  • generate engaging and fun experiences (online and offline)
  • encourage students to develop new learning styles

Limitations

  • Not for all disciplines
  • only those interested in innovative learning styles
  • not to be used in conventional classroom settings
  • for HE education market only
  • using open source technology (OSM)
  • not a field course
  • it is a toolkit to help instructors to create and experiment with new and alternative learning structures
  • geographical transferability
  • issues around exclusion

Brief for the session

Problem: what would such a fieldwork app look like?
Goals: to develop ideas in the group from different disciplinary perspectives that can later be tested by the design team
Aspirations: to share existing insights from the Gozo fieldcourse; to identify key principles of ‘field play’ ; to create mechanics and aesthetic ideas in a quick design challenge; to reflect on the project and the complex relations between pedagogy and play experience
Limitations: we are not expecting to finish the project here!

2. Playdough Plaza- Learning Through Squishing [60 mins]

Dr Gemma Lace-Costigan

Playdough is a useful tool to facilitate active learning in the adult classroom. It is used to promote engagement, to encourage interaction and discussion between students, to change the atmosphere of the learning environment and importantly, to create memorable and satisfying learning experiences for students. This session will explore some preliminary research on the use of playdough in large group human anatomy lectures and will highlight the benefits of playful playdough practice in higher education. This session will also provide opportunities for participants to develop and share ideas through a series of short, creative and interactive activities which will of course, include hands on playdough modelling. Participants will be encouraged to keep, share and reflect on their creations throughout the conference using #playfulplaydoughpractice

3. We are the Game Changers: An Open Gaming Literacy Programme [30 mins]

Sylvester Arnab
Morini, L.; Green, K; Masters, A.; Bellamy-Wood, T.

This paper will focus the first iteration of the Game Changers Programme of Coventry University, an open six-week workshop which will explore the role and the opportunities of game design thinking in fostering creative problem solving, cross-disciplinary design collaboration and gaming literacy (Zimmerman, 2008). The programme has the ultimate goal of facilitating new models of teaching and learning, new practices in cross-faculty learning/collaboration and the development of new mindsets in the use of creative means for problem framing and solving, applicable to a wide variety of different courses and real world situations. In our vision, an optimal way to achieve this is to make game design and development more culturally open and accessible to staff, students and the broader informal communities surrounding the University, thus promoting transdisciplinary learning by designing and fostering a playful and creative culture (Salen, 2007).

The theoretical foundation of the Game Changers Programme lies in the conceptualisation of design as a non-linear, systemic, iterative, generative, creative and incremental process. The paper discusses how design thinking will cross over to learning in a specific material context, that of Coventry University Disruptive Media Learning Lab, where it reveals itself as a “way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practitioners” (Kelley & Kelley, 2013). As it pertains particularly to game design, it will be thematised as a broad “set of skills, competencies or dispositions relating to the highly iterative collaborative process designers employ when conceiving, planning and producing an object or system” (Institute of Play, 2013). Game design involves a creative combination of rules (mechanics), interactions (dynamics, aesthetics), contents, systems and narratives that will necessitate and encourage the development of a transdisciplinary mindset in all participants, encouraging them in acknowledging their ability to “learn to learn” (Rawson, 2000) The Programme will focus on the design and development of games of any typology (boardgames, cardgames, digital games, etc.) as freely chosen by the participants. The initial pilot will be a gamified six-week Programme that will involve weekly stages (missions) with sub-tasks (quests), a structure which will scaffold the activities and through which the participants will self-evaluate and keep constant trace of their design processes in an iterative “design diary”. The stages and contents are developed based on the holistic and modular model for designing gamified learning developed at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (Arnab, 2015), and highlighting how its different layers (Learning Context, Learning Design,Gameful Design and Technology) are intended to be visited and re-visited in an iterative and incremental manner to consolidate the design requirements and specifications.

The Programme will assist participants organising open sessions with experts (workshops, speakers, etc.) throughout the process, and a variety of public domain support materials will be made available via a dedicated Game Changers online resource. Having the content delivered and driven by user experience, the programme will be presented by means of a website, which will also have aggregation features to pull in the community’s progress and associated conversations, further fostering and scaffolding collaboration and learning in an open and engaging way, and encouraging an ethos of sharing, collaborating and remixing. The paper will discuss and present, together with the above mentioned design diaries, a plural showcase of a variety of multimedia excerpts, “snapshots” and products from the Game Changers Community, focusing on the Programme’s cultural impact and on how the Programme as a whole will disrupt notions of hierarchy between staff and students and the separation of formal and informal learning.

4. Playing against the game [30 mins]

Bernd Remmele

Together with a colleague the presenter recently proposed to be more attentive to ‘negative gaming’ when it comes to game-based learning. There are different ways to approach games negatively, i.e. taking part in the gaming interaction but not committing to the rules and/or goals of the game, mainly discussed have been trifling, cheating or spoilsporting. A rather neglected way is to play against the game, i.e. looking for other playable goals. This dimension however seems particularly interesting for game-based learning, because here ‘the’ given goal or goals are ambivalent. Even if the learning goal the gaming goal coincide, to introduce a learning goal from beyond the frame of the game is likely to provoke some resilience. Thus this approach relates to the more general question whether learning games can be good games at all.

Though this issue has been rather neglected in research, as a phenomenon it is easy to grasp. It is like playing against the game; the playful tension results from the uncertainty when the framework of the game disrupts. This means adding to this primary game a second level game. Hence these behaviours are tapping game-specific motivational sources – of particular negativity. Whether the player/learner is still somehow confronted with the specific tasks of the learning game is thus still learning needs to be analysed for the specific case.

The mentioned previous assumptions on negative gaming in relation to game based learning have been mainly theoretical and/or based on general evidence. Meanwhile the author can present some more specific empirical evidence from evaluations of different learning games in the field of business and economics education. Questions like ‘I wanted to know when the company goes bankrupt’ or ‘I wanted to see what happens when my avatar is starving’ show a relevant amount of affirming answers, and can be interpreted as cases of playing against the game.

Against this backdrop the presenter will initiate a discussion concerning the experiences among the audience of playing against the game (from other fields learning). A further impulse for the discussion will be the question, whether the tendency to play against the game relates more to the general lack of other playful motivations (learning games are bad games) or does it relate to the level of competences that are tested in the respective learning game (can a learning game be motivating for students that are too good or too bad for it).

5. Lyra: blurring the line between the physical and virtual to encourage engagement [90 mins]

Mark Shand

In this playful activity session we’re going to be making and playing. There’s going to be paper and geometric shapes and augmented reality and puzzle fitting.

And scissors.

There’s also going to be sword-wielding squirrels. But we’ll get to that later…

Delegates will be playing with an element of an ‘engagement experiment’ created to encourage collaboration and teamwork within the PAL (peer assisted learning) programme and its credited module (currently with over 1200 student PAL leaders) at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). Like the students, delegates will be working with specially designed templates and pre-formed patterned shapes which they’ll build themselves. These strange geometric 3D objects will exist outside of the task-based challenges they would normally have to complete, and are an extension of their online presence and ‘released’ as they progress. These ‘physical presences’ can be rotated, slid, folded and connected with matching objects belonging to others across the group/course. A priority of our PAL module is encouraging students to work together, and it is through this collaboration and ‘mutual construction’ that players are able to reveal new faces and patterns to their objects. These new forms unlock augmented reality puzzles and animations (those sword wielding squirrels!), opening up an extra dimension to the physical creation in their hands.

This project sought to address concerns about student engagement with a previously handbook-based module and its task-based approach. An aesthetic approach to the challenge was adopted, with an extra layer of meaning being added through external play that sought to explore some of the concerns and themes associated with the work of PAL leaders (namely teamwork, collaboration, presence, the social). Just as a daemon in the His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman) is a physical manifestation of the human soul in the form of an animal, so this was to be a manifestation of the student’s online course presence – the virtual made tangible. The creation of objects that might resonate with their owners as emotional characters in their own right. As individuals collaborate and change the nature of their objects, they also affect their own experience of progressing through the course.

I am hoping to give the constructions awareness of others they might want to connect with (through a physical change in an object when a fellow student is online) resulting in an augmented co-presence. But is this what delegates and students want? I would like to pose this and other questions, to interactions, gain insights and challenges from other playful practitioners, and look at developing the mechanics and play of the experience further before it goes live (alive?) in September.

Outline of the session:
1. Arriving delegates will be met with an invitation to download the relevant augmented reality app if they want to. They will also be given an anonymous (brief) questionnaire to capture responses during the Lyra session.
2. An introduction to the event will put the issue of student engagement in context and provide an explanation of how Lyra works alongside the university course (5 minutes)
3. The outline of what’s going to happen in the session (5 minutes)
4. An opportunity to create the shapes, put them together with others and unlock the augmented animations (approximately 35 minutes)
5. The concluding debrief, feedback and discussion period (approximately 15 minutes) There will be 3 tables in the room, each representing a different stage of the Lyra experience:
Stage A: Delegates will interact with a condensed mock-up of the online course. Shape templates will be ‘released’ on successful responses to tasks.
Stage B: The group will then cut out templates, fold and stick together to form the geometric shapes.
Stage C: The objects can then matched and placed together, with delegates able to ‘bring them to life’ using their own devices or those supplied.

I’m hoping to test whether the intended play characteristics (social, collaboration, fun) are present and, if so, do they successfully align with the core values of the PAL course (social, collaboration, peer interaction). Does it fall short of this? Does it provide any unforeseen benefits? In turn, I hope delegates will have fun making, with an opportunity to discuss in the concluding debrief how they might imaginatively complement their existing credit (or non-credit) bearing course with playful activities. I’ll be asking what people feel about notions of offline/online and physical/virtual – and whether they feel that the layering of abstract material and ideas over their own courses might be engaging for students. I’ll be interested to hear if people believe that some courses are more suited to ‘fun’ than others, and whether they believe this notion should be challenged. I’ll be happy to answer any questions and give demos if wanted, and I intend to make the whole development process open and online at the Lyra project page for those seeking more specific technical information. http://eicuwe.net/lyra

Practical notes: delegates can move from stage to stage to get an insight into the process. If attendance is significant then it may be appropriate to divide into three, initially assigning each group a different stage and periodically rotating them. It is anticipated that some stages may be more popular than others! Templates will be pre-printed to fit the condensed accelerated time restraints of the hour-long session. Some made objects will also be supplied for this very reason. Laptops will be supplied by myself, although delegates are free to use their own.

7. Designing enhanced Board Games for Dementia care: engaging families, friends and community [60 mins]

Sam Ingleson
Dormann, C.

From ancient times to nowadays, board games have been an important source of entertainment and education. Indeed, playing board games have been recognised in providing pleasure and enjoyment. Motivational factors to play them include intrinsic satisfaction, feelings of competence, perceived freedom, stimulation and joy. Many board games have been designed for learning and for education settings in numerous domains. Board games stimulate social interaction and collaborative learning. They can be used to acquire skillsets, improving self-reflection and discovery, or to change attitudes and beliefs (Caballero-Coulon et al. 2007). Thus building on the strengths and functions of board games, we want to explore the potential of enhanced board games for dementia care, considering more particularly what role technology and digital media can play in this context. Dementia describes a set of symptoms that may include memory loss and difficulties with thinking, problem-solving or language (www.alzheimers.org.uk). We aim to create engaging games that produce difference socio-cultural learning and entertaining experiences for all those confronted and dealing with dementia (e.g. people living with dementia, carers, families and friends, professional caregivers, etc.).

There are many variations on how digital technology can be integrated into board games, to supplement or complement physical games and to provide new gameplay experiences. We focus more specifically on ways that it can support problem solving and enhance gameplay in the context of dementia. Sensory awareness, musical responsiveness, and emotional memory, are longer remaining abilities in people living with dementia, (Lawton & Rubinstein, 2000). The more common and simplest way to incorporate digital media in this context, especially for reminiscence board games (e.g. remembering the past to engage in enjoyable conversation) is to add and provide audio, pictures and videos to the board games. These media are used as further triggers to prompt positive responses in the form of interactions or improved mood. This allows players to access additional content beyond what is immediately in front of them on a traditional board whilst providing a playing surface that is not too visually cluttered at the start of play.

Different combinations of virtual and physical board game components could have enormous potential in this context. Offering a range of objects that can be interacted with (smells, tastes, textures visual, aural) can improve multi-sensory stimulation, whilst the board game context provides an element of familiarity and structure to the activities. Combining board games with rich media allows us to create new game experiences. Customisation or the possibility to adapt or configure games to the cognitive capabilities of different players is a tremendous advantage in using digital technology in this context (Bouchard et al 2012). This enables a games facilitator to respond to individual players levels of engagement, competency, and mood on a particular day, in order to select the most appropriate degree of difficulty to set the games to.

However, the use of digital technology also has another advantage, that the content can be revised and personalised to respond to particular user groups. The game becomes a platform for generating and sharing for example, personal, familial or community stories that can be uploaded, viewed and used in subsequent play. The games become a growing repository of knowledge and personal experiences that can be accessed by a wider user group and built upon with additional anecdotes. Enhanced board games can support cooperative creative thinking and problem solving.

Initial observations have highlighted the importance of dementia friendly community centres to provide support and opportunities to increase social engagement, playful interaction, reflection and the reduction of isolation. Working with network groups associated with the Institute for Dementia, we have been engaging in a process of co-design around enhanced digital board games. This enables the designers to build a relationship with the community and its stakeholders. In this way the centres become co-owners of the games and can promote these activities as part of their community offer.

In this session, we will deliver a presentation about the dementia context and its problems, offer an opportunity to play a prototype game to introduce the research issues (15 minutes), then organise a discussion around specific themes / issues in small groups (5 minutes) which then be summarised with the audience. (5 minutes) and draw the session to a conclusion (5 minutes).

References
Caballero-Coulon M., Ferri-Campos J., Garcia-Blazquez M., Chirivella-Garrido J., Renau-Hernandez O., Ferri-Salvador N. & Noe-Sebastian E. (2007) The ‘awareness climbing’: an edu- cational board game for improving self-awareness following acquired brain injury. Revista de Neurologia 44, 334–338.
Lawton, M. P., & Rubinstein, R. L. (Eds.). (2000). Interventions in dementia care: Towards improving quality of life. NewYork, NY: Springer.
Bouchard, B, Imbeault, F., Bouzouane, A., and Menelas, B. J. “Developing serious games specifically adapted to people suffering from Alzheimer”, in Serious Games Development and Applications. Springer (2012), pp. 243-254.

8. These are a few of our favourite tools [90 mins]

Karenne Sylvester
Reed, H.

Would you like to make a game to use in class next week/month?

This very practical workshop will demonstrate some of the easily accessible websites and tools available which can be used to create your own playful and interactive activities in lectures or classrooms. We’ll show you how to add a splash of fun to your lessons while you’re presenting or reviewing core pedagogical content.

Session breakdown:
5-10mins: downloading Kahoot and Quizlet to Smartphones, brief discussion of their benefits
20mins: demonstrating Quizlet, then playing a “Kahoot” based on the role of play in learning; demonstrating and discussing the uses of a few other tools including Spiral, Poll Everywhere, Baamboozle, Socrative, and Quizalize.
45 mins: giving participants the option to create one or more of the above interactive experiences, logging on to websites, creating accounts and making games/interactive lessons; providing digital support
15 mins: demonstrating a few of the participant newly created activities; reflection on what was created and why beneficial to learning
Questions

Karenne Sylvester has a Masters in Educational Technology & TESOL and is currently studying for a diploma in Game design and development. She has been a teacher for over twenty years and has lived, worked, taught students and trained teachers in the use of digital devices, web tools and the Interactive Whiteboard in Hong Kong, Ecuador, Germany and the UK. She is currently the Digital Development Officer at New College Group, Manchester.
Helen Reed is an ESL teacher and teacher trainer who now works in Leeds and Manchester with students from all over the world. She spent over six years of her career being very wary and unconvinced of technology and online games in the classroom, before suddenly and enthusiastically embracing them two years ago. She has never looked back, now incorporating online activities into everything from grammar lessons to conversation classes.

14. Learning in Game Jams: A Case Study of the GLASS Summer School [30 mins]

Charlene Jennett
Kloetzer, L.; Himmelstein, J.; Vaugoux, A.; Iacovides, I;, Cox, A. L.

Game jams, hackathons and similar group game creation events have become increasingly popular over the past decade (Fowler et al., 2015). These competitive events are run in a variety of formats, have differing time constraints, and provide new and exciting opportunities for education and research. Coordinators of game jams have shared “lessons learned” on how to make these events into amazing collaborative opportunities (Preston et al., 2012). Recent research has explored how game jam participants work together in teams and the different group forming processes that affect game jams of different sizes (Pirker & Voll, 2015). However, we still know very little about what participants actually learn by taking part in these events, and how to measure their learning.

In this session we present our case study of the GLASS Summer School. In 2015, the CRI Game Lab with the help of the Citizen Cyber Lab and the Gamelier association opened their first summer school program in Paris, where 15 students were selected from all over Europe to work together to create scientific games. The objectives were two-fold: to train students to work interdisciplinary projects with teammates of different backgrounds; and to create games that can be used for scientific education or research. They wanted to explore new methods to create scientific games by mixing students from the worlds of game development and scientific research.

About two-thirds of the students came from game creation backgrounds, with a balance between graphic design, programming, and game design experience. The remaining third had various scientific backgrounds. The entire program was run over 9 weeks. The first two weeks were dedicated to ice-breakers, lectures, and workshops on scientific games and related concepts. The following two weeks were organized as two week-long game jams, in which the students were on different teams and could experiments with various ideas. Then their principal project began: to develop a 4-week scientific game for which they could rely on a number of mentors in various fields of scientific research. The ninth and final week was reserved for showcasing and promoting their game, including at the Cité des Sciences, the largest science museum in Europe.

To explore learning in the GLASS Summer School, we developed a pre- and post- learning survey, which we asked participants to fill in at the start of the summer school and at the end of the summer school. In the survey participants rated 29 skills on a 5 point scale, where 1 = no experience and 5 = fully skilled. The skills covered 4 main categories: organization, collaboration, game design, and science. Our results revealed that participants rated themselves significantly higher at the end of the summer school for 4 skills: collaboration with scientists (increased from “a little experience” to “some experience”), knowledge of game platforms and technologies (increased from “some experience” to “almost fully skilled”), game testing (increased from “some experience” to “almost fully skilled”), and knowledge of science (increased from “a little experience” to “some experience”). This work provides an important first step in quantifying the learning that occurs in a game jam. In future work, we would like to be able to adapt our survey to game jams that have different formats (e.g. different time scales, different sized groups), to explore how different game jam structures impact participants’ learning.

At the same time however, we know that our survey is limited because it relies on participants self-rating their skills. What if participants have an inaccurate perception of their own learning? In previous work we have used observation, questionnaires, post-play interviews and follow-up email questions to evaluate the outputs of game competitions in terms of how they impact on players (Iacovides & Cox, 2015). Yet it is less clear how to assess learning with respect to taking part in the competition process.

We envision this session would be interesting for anyone who is interested in exploring and discussing methods to evaluate learning experiences in the context of game jams, hackathons, and similar group co-creation events. At the end of our presentation, we will invite attendees to join us in discussing interesting questions such as: What kinds of activities worked well to engage people and provide opportunities for learning? What are the pros and cons of different evaluation approaches to measure learning in game jams? In addition to gaining useful feedback, we hope to potentially meet new collaborators who may be interested in using our learning survey at their game jam events.

References:
Fowler et al. (2015). Trends in Organizing Philosophies of Game Jams and Game Hackathons. Workshop Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. http://ggj.s3.amazonaws.com/GJ2015_submission_13.pdf
Iacovides, I., & Cox A.L. (2015). Moving beyond fun: Evaluating serious experience in digital games. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015, 2245-2254. ACM Press: New York. DOI: 10.1145/2702123.2702204
Pirker & Voll (2015). Group Forming Processes -Experiences and Best Practice from Different Game Jams. Workshop Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. http://ggj.s3.amazonaws.com/GJ2015_submission_11.pdf
Preston, J. A., Chastine, J., O’Donnell, C. O., MacIntyre, B. (2012). Game jams: Community, motivations, and learning among jammers. International Journal of Game-based Learning, 2 (3), 51-70. DOI: 10.4018/ijgbl.2012070104