Link: https://www.boardgamingwitheducation.com/games-in-schools-and-libraries/
About Kathleen: Educator with a special focus on teaching gifted students game design (Link)
Transcription: Otter.AI
I incorporated Kathleen’s presentation to these notes for the sake of consolidation.
Overview
Kathleen believes:
“Happiness comes from being able to choose the life you want to live.”
To empower students there are 2 anchor ideas:
Be Producers Not Consumers
…what I want more than anything for my students is for them to be creators, not consumers…The only thing I care about is what ideas they have, and giving them the tools where they feel empowered to take on big complex challenges where they have no idea of what the final product will be, but that they can build in and learn the skills and confidence that they can hopefully get themselves there. That’s what I care about because if I can get them to accept that and do that, then they can pretty much take on whatever challenges come their way for the rest of their lives.
Bias Towards Action
For those familiar with the Silicon Valley ethos of “Move fast and break things” this will be familiar. Despite, her midwest roots and home Kathleen’s thinking has been heavily influenced by the Stanford D-School.
…probably the biggest thing that’s helped me is the Stanford design school’s method of prototype development. I went to a design-thinking boot camp, and the design mindsets that were presented as far as when you’re wanting to design something for someone else, and how you should think about it. Here’s how you should approach it. And it was so different from what I was doing, but it was just one of those things where it’s like, oh my god this is 100%, what I should be doing and it completely pivoted everything that I was doing. For example “bias towards action”. Instead of just thinking about something just start doing it. Rapid iteration making prototypes fast and cheap so you can get them on the table so that you can fail quickly see what works, see what doesn’t work quickly and so you can make more versions of something even faster.
It’s designed to keep them moving quickly so that nothing becomes precious and nothing becomes so sacred that they won’t get rid of it. And I think for me as a teacher, that’s really helped me and also helped me as a game designer in terms of trying something getting it out there, seeing what happens getting feedback on it and making improvements to it as well.
Lessons From Teaching
On using games in learning
- I think for a lot of gaming experiences in the classroom, having everybody involved at the same time, really, really matters for success.” (Party games are a good tool for this)
- A good teacher can make a lot of things fun. Sparks a love of learning.
- Bridging the abstract to concrete
- Critical Thinking
- Information more sticky/accessible. Increases connections.
- Boosts engagement & connections (made me think of how a local teacher used Pokemon cards to bring the boys and girls in 1st grade together)
On kids having different abilities
- Everyone deserves to learn at their level every single day that’s just one of those tenets that I just hold. If you’re doing something where their disabilities or inabilities become apparent to others. I think you have to be really careful about how you handle that. As far as you know what you’re willing to do to, you know, protect them to take care of them because if they’re stressed out and embarrassed.
- Approach to gifted kids:
- If you don’t give gifted kids problems to solve, they will create their own.
- They need to learn how to struggle and work through it.
- Heterogeneous groupings can protect kids by partnering up.
- But homogenous groupings have advantages too.
For my gifted kids, a lot of times when that happens, they’re always like the ones that are like spread out amongst the other groups, and then they put all the spread out all the middle kids and then they spread out all this sort of low kids and pardon me for speaking in broad brushstrokes but I am. And so a lot of times they never get chances to work with each other. And one thing that research shows is that when you let kids have similar abilities work with each other. Everyone gains, because the kids on the middle step it up, and the kids on the lower end also step it up, even if it’s like one notch higher, you know, that’s okay for them, you know they’re using their abilities and what they know and trying to push themselves up to be more competitive as well
- Why the emphasis on points in winning is redundant.
Points are used to ultimately communicate your position in the game to other people. And if we’re playing a game that is just to be, you know, a review or something like that I don’t care about the points at all. And so, what I will often do is even if they get points, or if one team starts to get a blow out. I will, you know, do something like say “this is a 20 point question”, and then somehow I manage to make it so that kids on the other team get those points, or I start awarding ridiculous points my cool you just got a puppy. So drop puppy up there on the scoreboard.
Why teach game design?
- Develop analytical, practical, and creative thinking skills
- Autonomy and collaboration
- Teaching game design is teaching to orient towards an internal scorecard not an external one
That quantitative checkmark feeds into a lot of the programming that we’ve already done with kids as far as you know letter grades and standardized tests and success is 100% and success is, you know, an A plus is, you know, and I think for a lot of my students especially having to sort of break that mentality. A lot of what I do in teaching game design is here is this problem that cannot be solved, or notions like that. Here is this problem that you will have to you have to define the problem. You have to figure out how you’re going to solve this problem, you’re going to design your tests with these resources in terms of you know how close are you to solving this problem and you’re gonna do this again and again and again, you’re going to make a prototype you’re going to put it in front of other people, they’re going to play it, you’re going to get their feedback, and then you’re going to take those ideas, and that, you know, good, bad, the ugly. Incorporate that into your next design so that when that hits the table hopefully it’s better. Thinking of it as an unfinished unending hopefully upwardly ascending sort of cascade. See that process as a real process reflective of what life will be, I think is really important, because for a lot of my kids, you know they’ve learned what successes is and it’s an A+. I’m trying to show them that if you want to do anything cool, there will never be A+. You will never be finished. You will always just have to try to do your best to put out your best possible effort, listen to other people, and hopefully make that idea better and so that’s why I teach game design.
The reason why I teach game design is a teaches them this process of thinking design, thinking hands-on, trying to create solutions and learning how to see successes incremental progress, not as I finished I’m done.
We do talk about how it can be finished and not perfect and that’s really important for a lot of them. That you can have something that is unfinished. And you can see it as successful because you did try to make it better, even if you don’t think it’s better. And that’s really really hard for them to accept because it goes against everything they’ve always done
- An antidote to results-based thinking
I honestly try to minimize any type of objective points in any kind of game situation as much as possible, because no one should ever be blamed for losing for their team, and I honestly don’t want anybody to be, you know, the fourth batter to just hit the Grand Slam home run and they get all the credit, not the people who also got on first, second and third.
- Be thoughtful about when points matter
It does make sense to have kids have scoring that matters, but I think you have to really ask yourself, is this that time.
- Not having grades at all doesn’t really work
And if I had my choice I wouldn’t do grades at all, but this is the world we live in and I have to actually try tried one year to not give out grades and our gifted class. There’s some unintended consequences there but there you go. We tried it once. As much as we wanted it to work it didn’t really work.
Projects Kathleen and Dustin Are Pushing Forward
- Game Database To Aid Teachers looking to use games to augment material
I think that something you touched on and I’ve been kind of thrown around in my head is creating some sort of database where teachers are teaching a unit on something and they can go on there and see what kind of games they can use in their class to either tackle review or tackle preview and concepts of the whatever material they’re learning. It would be really good for teachers to find like a resource where they can just go to, and save time and kind of have this lesson plan that they can use.
- Formalizing standards
Look at the curriculum that I have and formalize it a little bit in terms of standards that it’s meeting. That’s something that people ask me about that I haven’t really ever have had to do. And I think it’s something that I’m interested in one because it will make it even easier for people to use these resources in their classroom but it also. I’m really like thinking about the idea of what are the things that people could do to get their kids to think like game designers to use design thinking, using games, what would be appropriate, you know the early elementary level, the later elementary level, the middle school level, the high school level. So that if somebody wants to do something with game design in the classroom, they’ve got a better chance of success. That they’re not over-shooting or under-shooting what their kids are able to do but also in terms of tying this, you know, more specifically to actual curriculum. Then it can be easier for their administrators to use.