Going to the Serious Play Conference has been one of the highlights of the year for me for the past three years. This year kicked things up a notch with it being my first time presenting and speaking about my own work! Now that the dust has settled a bit and I’m back home going through notes and photos and new ideas I finally have a chance to recap the experience with a couple of highlights.
1. I did a talk!
I don’t know if this is how all conferences are, but Serious Play is jam-packed with speakers. There are five separate “tracks” of concurrent presentations happening throughout the day. You jump from room to room between sessions to find the subjects that are most relevant/interesting to you, and after going to the conference last year I started to brainstorm my own idea for what I might want to talk about.
I settled on a topic that covered both my personal background as an artist and how I use my art to teach students about emotions. I basically troweled through all of the Lizard City working folders and files and found all the concept art I could, piled it together into a slideshow, and then made connections to the way that I teach students. In fact some of it I’ve already mentioned in earlier blog posts! I really enjoyed
2. I Learned things!
I love Serious Play because this Conference is just chock full o’ nerds. People come from all kinds of different backgrounds- medical, educational, business, government… So many types of thinkers all united under a single cause: to talk about games. With such a playful shared interest it’s easy to sit down at a table and just start a conversation with whoever happens to sit next to you. Everyone you speak to is an expert of something or a student learning to be an expert… the conversations are rich and passionate.
I went to a ton of amazing presentations that filled my brain up with ideas for the Game Not Included curriculum. From encouraging multilingual classrooms to incorporate the students’ native languages into conversation, to facilitating roleplay among your students to help establish and practice safe boundaries and navigate conflict. Some presentations were deeply personal and emotional, like a story of a Yale pediatrics expert using game design to process the loss of her son. Some talks were practical, like one about navigating the absolute maze of budget approvals and policy changes that is the K-12 educational market.
3. I had epiphanies
Three full days of information-packed presentations is enough to get anyone’s creative juices flowing at MAX FLOW (technical term), and I am no exception! Between sessions I had just enough down time to reflect on the different ways that people in industries outside of art and gaming think about games. This new perspective was so refreshing I feel like it knocked loose some concepts that I had been stuck on.
One of the big next steps for Game Not Included is to start thinking about teacher workshops. GNI is a curriculum for teens and so far I have been developing it with the students top-of-mind. As a teacher myself I tend to talk about game design and concept art in terms of how these tools can help students, but neglect to relate this work to teaching the teachers who will actually be using the lessons in class. Serious Play, and especially a talk about Ludic Language Pedagogy, helped me think about how this curriculum can be fun for teachers. Especially when it comes to digital art I know that the learning curve can be steep, and the prospect of teaching world building daunting. I’ve been thinking of ways that learning software, learning to teach character design or integrate photography into artwork, these things can be fun to learn! So in the next couple of weeks I’m going to be focusing some effort into creating a teacher workshop to lay the groundwork for teaching a full GNI course.
A second epiphany I can credit Serious Play for igniting is to take a more serious look at the multicultural classroom. The concept of translanguaging helps students feel heard when language barriers can keep them from connecting to their community. I will be taking what I learned from Serious Play to build a foundation in the GNI curriculum that encourages students to be inquisitive about each other’s native tongue. There may be a language and culture portion to the world building projects that can incorporate a multilingual perspective-something that I think will help the worlds that students create feel richer.
Okay, one last thing and then I’ll stop writing. Roleplaying. I mentioned this up in the Learning Things part of this meandering post, and it feels so obvious in a place where students are making characters and worlds… but until now I didn’t feel like I had a good way to implement roleplaying into the curriculum. A talk about how to roleplay with vulnerable populations helped lay out ways that roleplaying can serve as a catalyst for collaboration. Roleplaying can be a great starting point for teachers to outline a project in a way that feels like a puzzle that the class can solve collectively. I’m really interested in the idea of students taking on the role of their characters to interact with parts of each others’ worlds.
It’s been less than a week since the conference ended and I am frantically trying to remember and write every detail while it’s still fresh in my memory! Hopefully this recap gives you a sense of how Game Not Included can take lessons from these different perspectives and mold them into something cool.