Complex Mechanics:
9 Gamed-Up Teaching Approaches
for Creating Rigorous Learning Games
* CONFERENCE TRADING CARDS Version *
Every conference could use a good ice-breaker. But what if your ice-breaker could also serve as a kind of informal, interactive pedagogy exercise?
With my conference trading cards, each attendee receives 9 beautifully-drawn flashcards that describe approaches for designing non-digital learning games. But only some of the cards received are unique; the rest are duplicates. Since no one receives a complete set, they must find and talk to other conference attendees in order to hunt down who has the missing cards, then trade their duplicates for those cards!
In its first year, this icebreaker has already been run at 2 different conferences, and it’s been a hit each time. If you like, you can have a formal 20-minute period for the icebreaker the first morning of registration (to get everyone walking around and talking to each other, rather than sitting alone and eating bagels), but the real beauty here is that the cards are meant to be traded throughout your entire conference, in the wee minutes between panels, and they serve as a pleasant social mechanism for introducing yourself to attendees.
Price:
Each person receives 1 set of 9 cards (normally this is 3 copies of 3 different cards, so the sets are incomplete on purpose).
50 sets: $6/person (this is the minimum order)
200 sets or more: $4/person
You will receive your cards in special boxes, along with table instructions for how your attendees can draw the cards so that they are randomized.
Ordering: Contact me by clicking here. (If you learned about this product from someone, please let me know his or her name as well.)
Scroll down to learn more information about these cards!
At the Revolutionary Learning 2016 Games Conference, Avery Rueb (Affordance Studio) and Joseph DeSimone (Monte Cook Games) do some last-minute trading of my Conference Gaming Cards.
A Brief Theoretical Overview:
On this page, you’ll notice 3 examples of my Complex Mechanic cards (front and back). There are 9 unique cards in total, all classified by Bloom’s taxonomy and what I call “Simple Mechanics” and Deep Learning Principles. When attendees receive these cards during the conference, they also get a half-sized piece of paper (see image below), which quickly summarizes the gist of the learning theories.
After the conference (if they like), for more information about these creative principles and teaching approaches, they can read a whole best-selling book I wrote on the subject! It’s called The Educator’s Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises: The Allure of Play, published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press.
The most important part of the icebreaker is that the teacher is immediately engaged by the game design possibilities the card presents, and how the suggested “gamed-up teaching approach” might apply to a lesson the teacher has in mind. And of course, to get these conference attendees talking and trading with each other—and discussing which exercises they do are already similar to these mechanics! Even beyond the icebreaker, attendees are grateful to be given such a useful teaching take-away.
How these Cards are Different Than the Full Version:
I have a different design tool called “Complex Mechanics: 9 Gamed-up Teaching Approaches” (view it here) which consists of 17 flashcards and a game box. The “Conference Version” described on the page you’re reading now consists of only the most important cards from the full version, so that you can get the product more cheaply for a large-scale event.
