New Traditional Games for Learning

A Case Book

Alex Moseley, Nicola Whitton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415815819
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135072377
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A growing interest in the use of games-based approaches for learning has been tempered in many sectors by budget or time constraints associated with the design and development of detailed digital simulations and other high-end approaches. However, a number of practitioners and small creative groups have used low-cost, traditional approaches to games in learning effectively – involving simple card, board or indoor/outdoor activity games. New Traditional Games for Learning brings together examples of this approach, which span continents (UK, western and eastern Europe, the US, and Australia), sectors (education, training, and business) and learner styles or ages (primary through to adult and work-based learning or training). Together, the chapters provide a wealth of evidence-based ideas for the teacher, tutor, or trainer interested in using games for learning, but turned off by visible high-end examples.

An editors' introduction pulls the collection together, identifying shared themes and drawing on the editors' own research in the use of games for learning. The book concludes with a chapter by a professional board game designer, incorporating themes prevalent in the preceding chapters and reflecting on game design, development and marketing in the commercial sector, providing valuable practical advice for those who want to take their own creations further.

1

Dicing with Curricula

The Creation of a Board Game to Speed up the Course Creation Process

ALEX MOSELEY, UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER, UK

Setting the Context

In this chapter I will describe the creation of a simple board game. Behind the dice and cards, however, is a complex set of ideas combined with a long history of contextual education theory. Their distillation into a simple, portable game is a process that I believe can be transferred to any education or training setting with effective results. While this chapter focuses on an instructional/course design setting, the principles and advice can be applied to the reader’s own context readily, as I will describe in the concluding sections.

To begin, though, I will describe my own local context, and the need that gave rise to the game-based solution; followed by a brief history of the theory that inspired me around the use of contexts and authenticity in education (and, more recently, in educational games). An overview of the design of the board game will be followed by a qualitative reflection on its effectiveness by players of the game, with the chapter concluding with practical advice on using similar approaches in other settings.

My professional role within my institution is that of an instructional designer. The field of instructional design:

encompasses the analysis of learning and performance problems, and the design, development, implementation, evaluation and management of instructional and non-instructional processes and resources intended to improve learning and performance in a variety of settings, particularly educational institutions and the workplace.

(Reiser, 2001: 53)

In more compact practical terms, instructional designers work with subject specialists with a goal to produce effective courses that meet a number of different needs.

The first time an instructional designer meets with an academic department to revise or create a new course, the initial meeting is a difficult one. Somehow the departmental staff have to be drawn back from their own concerns, opinions and their current modes of working and asked to take a wider view of the course and how it might best serve the students, academic subject, market conditions and other factors. This process might take an afternoon with receptive departments or might take many meetings and different approaches before all aspects are accepted and valued by departmental staff.

This variable process takes place with every new project, so I and my team identified the need for a useful re-usable tool or activity to help replace, standardise or improve the efficiency of the process.

A particular feature of the problem is that staff need to understand a complex, and in many ways alien, context – including factors and conditions that they would not consider without visualising themselves and their course within this new context. This problem is, of course, not unique to course design; students of any new topic, no matter their level of expertise otherwise, must understand the wider context of the new subject and start to see themselves within it, before their learning becomes easier or more effective. The process described in this paper, and the resulting game-based approach, are therefore useful for any training or education setting involving complex contextual issues, as described in the following sections.

Authentic Contexts: A History

The origins of a theoretical consideration of context within education stretch back to the 1960s, when Gilbert Ryle, a philosopher, coined the phrases thin and thick description to distinguish between an out-of-context and in-context observation by ethnographers (Ryle, 1968). As an example, he describes the difference between a twitch and a wink: while both, on camera, look the same, the meaning and context behind the wink is much more detailed; Ryle goes even further to compare a ‘fake wink’ and one with actual meaning behind it. A thin description of the fake-winker might be “rapidly contracting his right eyelid” while the thick description would be along the lines of “faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion” (Geertz, 1973, p. 6) – much deeper layers of meaning contextualising the apparently simple action.

From another angle, Lev Vygotsky’s work on child development led to his zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), which internalised the context into learners themselves. For any given individual, the zone of proximal development is the space between his or her current level of development and the level he or she would attain with suitable expert help. Once in this zone, attuned to their own contexts, learners develop more rapidly. Lave and Wenger, in the 1980s and 1990s, developed this theory into communities of learners, engaged in common methods and practices with shared goals or ideals: a community of practice. Sharing a strong context will see novice members form a zone of proximity with ‘elder’ members, and benefit from enhanced and more relevant learning as a result (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).

David Kolb described the way in which effective learning makes use of experiences – or applying existing knowledge to a real-life context (Kolb, 1984). Drawing on earlier theorists, Kolb constructed an experiential learning cycle, which describes a continual loop of testing out knowledge in a real context (applying it), then reflecting on the success or failure of this experience (which generates new knowledge), then re-applying this new knowledge to a real context, and so on through the loop. It is easy to apply Kolb’s cycle to our own experiences: playing computer games, for example, often involves trying to complete a level, or fight an opponent, or solve a puzzle. By trying one tack, failing, then trying a new approach, and continuing to try new approaches each time (building on the previous attempts) until we succeed, we are engaging in experiential learning.

Formal education rarely incorporates real-life (or simulated) experiences within the curriculum – and where they do occur, they are usually as special departures: fieldwork, industry visits, etc. – making the link between theory and practice somewhat problematic. How about embedding the whole learning process within an experiential context though? This was the aim of authentic education, which started to emerge in the early 1980s, but by the 1990s was gaining widespread interest. Shaffer and Resnick (1999) analysed this area to come up with four types of thickly authentic educational experience:

a) activities that are aligned with the outside world;

b) assessment that is aligned with instruction;

c) topics that are aligned with what learners want to know;

d) methods of enquiry that are aligned with the discipline.

(after Shaffer & Resnick, 1999: 197–199)

For a learning experience to be thickly authentic, all of these conditions have to be met. Shaffer later combined this work with Collins and Ferguson’s (1993) ideas of epistemic forms and epistemic games. They distinguished these as “the difference between the squares that are filled out in tic-tac-toe and the game itself” (p. 25). The epistemic forms are the squares or the structure, the underlying context; whereas the epistemic games are played out upon it with particular “rules, strategies, and different moves that players master over a period of time” (p. 25).

Shaffer took these ideas and, applying them to the theories of authenticity and communities of practice already described, suggested that an epistemic frame can be used to describe the “practice, identity, interest, understanding, and epistemology” (2005, p. 1) of particular communities. Taking one example, “Lawyers act like lawyers, identify themselves as lawyers, are interested in legal issues, and know about the law. These skills, affiliations, habits, and understandings are made possible by looking at the world in a particular way – by thinking like a lawyer” (2005: 1) – an epistemic frame for a lawyer would then feature all of these aspects. Epistemic frames for other professions, or interest groups, would be different – but all would have rich descriptions of the particular group.

Epistemic frames therefore provide a very useful context in which to base educational activity: if the learning is designed within the epistemic frame, it will all be embedded within the context of the subject or profession the student is working in or aiming towards. Shaffer describes this type of learning by extending the definition of epistemic games – activities that use methods, tools and approaches from the profession or subject in order to solve problems that reflect those a professional would have to deal with: “they make it possible for students to learn through participation in authentic recreations of valued reflective practices” (2005: 4). Using the example of lawyers, students might be given a typical real world briefing and asked to run a moot court, being assessed on their professional performance – all activities and assessment fitting within the epistemic frame.

Why a Board Game?

It should be noted that Shaffer’s (and Collins and Ferguson before him) notion of an epistemic game is not intended entirely literally: the ‘game’ being merely a set of rules, methods, approaches and strategies. However, Shaffer in particular has applied his ideas to designing playful experiences, or games in the literal sense, to increase engagement and teach concepts within an authentic context (e.g. the game Madison 2200, described in Shaffer (2005: 4), although he admits this is strictly somewhat closer to a simulation than a game).

What persuaded me to take a game-based approach to my course design meeting problem, though, was the work of Charlier and Clarebout (2009) who designed and used a board game to formally assess the understanding of key first aid and basic life support concepts; Charlier’s chapter (Chapter 4) in this volume describes the design and application of their game. Although focused on assessment (and hence applying knowledge, rather than widening existing knowledge) their game was found to increase mean scores when compared to traditional paper-based tests. The authors speculate that this may be a result of both a reduction of fear/stress (games are “fun, motivating, challenging” when compared to the “fear of examination”) but also of peer feedback during the game. An important aspect the authors missed, however, was the context: whereas a written test begins straight away by focusing in on specific problems, the board game eased the participants into the context of a third world country and real-world problems – testing their reactions to contextual events. This swift, effective (given the increased scores) generation of an authentic context, and the consideration of key concepts and methods within it, fits well with Shaffer’s model of an epistemic game, which gave me a compelling model for my own particular need.

Designing the Game

I decided on a simple board or card game as a potential solution to my problem. It had to be something that could be reused as often as required, taken along to an initial meeting between an instructional designer and a department, set up quickly with easy rules and within 20–30 minutes aim to set up an authentic context and place the players within the epistemic frame of a knowledgeable course designer. By thinking, acting and reflecting within this epistemic frame, the participants could then engage more fully in the remainder of that – and future – meetings.

The aims of the game design were therefore:

• to encourage participants to step back and place themselves in the position of a knowledgeable course designer, looking at the course holistically;

• to give participants an idea of the range of pedagogic, administrative and technical elements available when designing and building a course (the tools of the epistemic frame);

• to remind participants that they have to think about their markets and their students’ needs, in addition to academic content;

• to give participants a chance to test course designs against authentic situations, without educational, financial or reputational damage;

• to provide a playful/fun experience (to separate it from a simulation, and increase engagement with the process).

Principles for the game came from Schell (2008), who despite focussing on digital games, provides a very useful set of principles and ‘lenses’ for approaching all types of games. The excellent discussion on numerous game design sites, such as the Board Game Designers Forum (2011) and the Journal of Boardgame Design (2011), aided in its design. Of no little importance was my own experience of the board games I had played over time – looking at a superficial level at what makes games like Monopoly, Risk and backgammon compelling and playful experiences.

The Design Process

Over a number of months I developed a prototype version of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Dicing with Curricula: The Creation of a Board Game to Speed up the Course Creation Process
• 2 The Mutation Game – A Versatile Educational Tool
• 3 Three Boys and a Chess Set
• 4 Game-based Learning as a Vehicle to Teach and Assess First Aid Competencies
• 5 A Game of Phones – Design, Development and Delivery Case Study
• 6 From Idea to Product – A Board Game for Preschoolers
• 7 Adventure Initiative Games: Playing towards Social Competence
• 8 An Artist’s Approach to Board Games
• 9 Simulation Game: Taking the Horses to Water
• 10 Larps in High Schools
• 11 War of Worlds – An Interactive Board Game about Life beyond Earth
• 12 Contexts and Concepts: Crafty Ways to Consider Challenging Topics
• 13 Building Soma: The Development, Release and Postmortem of Healing Blade, a Novel Infectious Disease Card Battle Game
• 14 Designing Card and Board Games
• About the Contributors
• Index