How can educational experiences be more motivational, more engaging and more useful for learning? What can games and play tell us about creating experiences for our learners that feel meaningful, immersive and that sparks their curiosity and drive to keep learning?
This course offers a creative and supportive environment to explore the relationship between play, games, and psychological concepts related to learning. You will explore the potential application of commercial games in educational settings, games that have been specifically created with educational objectives in mind, and a wider array of practices in experiential learning that can broadly be described as game-informed and playful.
In parallel with this practical emphasis, the course will provide a theoretical context for the relationships between games, play and learning. You will have the opportunity to focus on those concepts that are most relevant to you, choosing from potential topics such as ethics, flow, identity, motivation, narrative, scaffolding and transfer.
The course activities and assignments will encourage you to synthesise your theoretical and experiential insights and apply them thoughtfully to your own professional context, culminating in your development of an innovative and engaging playful design.
Keywords: games-based learning, games-informed learning, play, psychology, experiential learning.
The key element of this course is experiential learning through games and playful activities. You don’t have to be a gamer, but you do need to be willing to be playful to do this course. We will engage with a range of gaming activities across the weeks, some individual and some with the option for collective play (such as World of Warcraft and Minecraft).
We will start by exploring the concepts of games and play from a few different disciplinary perspectives, considering how games might inform learning and critiquing educational games.
We will then turn to a more flexible and open approach as you pick the themes that most interest you while coming together regularly to discuss our learning and to play together. Themes you might explore include ethics, failure, flow, identity, motivation, narrative, scaffolding and transfer. You can also nominate a theme to explore and we will help you find appropriate resources and activities to scaffold that exploration.
The course finishes with a focus on developing your own playful design for a learning context that’s relevant to you.
The "Course Cup" acts as a meta-activity throughout, offering a playful and gamified structure of activities and rewards to motivate collective approaches to study, to scaffold preparation for assessments and to give you an experience of a game-informed approach.
“This course is about positivity and creativity. It’s the most fun I have teaching and brings me joy every time it runs. Whether you’re a gamer or not, as long as you are up for trying things out and talking ideas through with others, you’ll have a good time and learn a lot.”
- Clara O’Shea, Course Organiser
Playing games is a key element in our coursework. You do not need to be a gamer, just come ready to have some playful experiences. We will play some games together, others will be single player games to do in your own time.
We will use live video sessions as opportunities to discuss our gaming experiences alongside concepts and literature and to help you think through your own developing game design. These will be recorded for those who cannot attend.
We will use collaborative annotations and comments to work through key readings together and have text-based discussions at times that suit you. These slower-paced activities allow time and space for you to develop your ideas while still benefitting from peer and tutor interactions.
There are three assessments in this course:
Critical review (20%):
You will review a digital game and evaluate how it might inform learning in a formal, informal or non-formal educational setting (equivalent to 1000 words).
Position paper (30%):
You will write a critical reflection on your chosen course theme, relating this to your own education experiences (equivalent to 1000 words).
Playful design (50%):
You will design a game or game-informed playful activity (with or without dependency on digital technologies) directed towards the promotion of your chosen learning outcome (equivalent to 2000 words).
The assessments are intended to evaluate your understanding of the concepts and literature you will encounter on this course. They are an opportunity to demonstrate your synthesis of those with your own experiential learning, reflexive approach to teaching and your professional context.
The assessments are intended to build from lighter touch theoretical work with a stronger emphasis on learning from experience, to a more focused take on theoretical and empirical literature relevant to your context, and finally to an opportunity to transform the knowledge you have developed into a creative and theoretically robust playful design that accounts for the specifics of your professional context.
In this course, you will gain insight from your own experiences of game and play, develop expertise in a range of game-informed, playful and relevant psychological concepts and craft a playful design that is well-theorised and has a nuanced understanding of your own professional context.
On completion of the course, you will be able to:
- Understand the characteristics, terminology and categorisation of games, play and related psychological concepts
- Critically evaluate a range of games and game environments through theoretical perspectives, direct experience and immersion
- Evaluate and critically assess the relation between play, games and learning in formal and informal settings
- Design, describe and evaluate your own original approach to game-informed or playful learning in your own educational context
Readings:
Sicart, M. (2014). Play matters. MIT Press. Chapter 1: Play Is. pp.1-18
Juul, J. (2013). The art of failure : an essay on the pain of playing video games. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
Whitton, N. (2022). Play and Learning in Adulthood: Reimagining Pedagogy and the Politics of Education. Springer Nature.
Podcast:
Madigan, J. (Host). (2015-). The Psychology of Video Games. [Audio podcast series] https://www.psychologyofgames.com/podcast/
Course Organiser favourite:
Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.