Redesigning Board Games for Educational or Instructional Purposes
(3-hour workshop)
That’s right; I have another hands-on workshop besides What’s Your Game Plan? .
This one is a little more advanced than What’s Your Game Plan?, but the pace is more casual, since we’re performing the most fun activity of all: playing board games together!
Our workshop begins with educators and trainers playing fun, commercial board and card games together. After the audience plays their chosen game for a while, I will provide special cards of my design that break down each of these popular game’s core mechanics and explain how the game might be re-designed for any training exercise or instructional exercise.
The group will study these mechanics in-depth, along with written sample educational variants of the game they just played. What would normally be a complex design experience (i.e. studying game mechanics) is now FAR easier to understand, because we have the shared context of having just played a game with these mechanics.
Then the group picks a goal, and spend 20 minutes creating a training or instructional game inspired by their original game. The combined time for game play and game design, as well as the reflection period on how to solve a training problem or instructional problem, leads to another intellectually engaging and bonding experience, with concrete ideas the audience can take away, regardless of whether or not they go further with the particular game they designed.
Official Description (for the event schedule)
Are you a teacher, training manager, content designer or game designer? We’re going to play together a well-designed commercially-available board or card game (e.g. Pandemic, Carcassonne, Red7) for 45 minutes. Next, we will study reference cards I created that break down the core mechanics and explain how the game might be modified to teach any school or workplace instructional goal. Finally, you will pick such a goal, and spend 30 minutes designing in teams a new learning game inspired by the original game. By the time our session finishes, you will have found a thought-provoking and creative way to enhance your instruction. Designed by a professor of game-based learning pedagogy.
Shorter Workshop Version (1.5 hours, No Design)
If you do not have 3 hours, we can do a truncated version of the Redesigning workshop in 1.5 hours. This includes 40 minutes of game play, and 20 minutes of formal debriefing, where the groups discuss the mechanics behind their game and possible teaching adaptations. There will be no time for actual game design here, but people still appreciate this short version because they still can learn about game mechanics for their instruction by directly playing with games.
Workshop Design Components
Since this is a game design workshop, we’ll need lots of stuff like markers, poster paper, special cards, stickers, etc. Luckily for us, I have a master one-click buying list I can direct you to on Amazon that I’ve already curated for best value and price. Depending on your budget, or the supplies you already have, you can pick and choose from this list. Here is the link: http://astore.amazon.com/gamebaselea05-20?_encoding=UTF8&node=9 [Update: This link is not currently working. I can email you a Word doc with these items.]
