Our 2 day stint at CU Scarborough campus was brilliant and it was great that we get to bring back the GameChangers bus to Coventry. It did raise a few eyebrows but it was brilliant to see students engaging with our activities in the bus despite the horrible wet day!
GameChangers is essentially an initiative to promote and embed game design thinking through remixing playful approaches and techniques in the teaching and learning of the Coventry University Group. Situated under the Game Science research and development we are leading at the university, GameChangers is a practice-based instrument for us to explore, apply and implement play, games, serious games and gamification as a set of digital and non-digital tools that can be used to help us design engaging learning experiences.
Our next stop is CU London campus. As part of our investigation of learning “geographies” and spaces, we are looking to experiment pop-up creative spaces in London and see how such initiatives could turn ordinary spaces into a more interactive and playful learning environment. This initiative will also link to the spin off Newton funded CreativeCulture, where we are going to create creative spaces for the GameChangers programme at UNIMAS (our Malaysian Partner).
The GameChangers open course will be soft-launched in May, where we will showcase the work of our colleagues who are implementing playful and gameful approaches in their teaching. So watch this space!
The GameChangers programme is an exploratory and experimental programme at Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab, where we explore the application and implication of play and games in teaching and learning, specifically in HE. And we are currently going on tour!
As part of the two new spin-offs of the programme, the mobile GameChangers part-funded by HEFCE aims to expand the initiative’s remit to include the other Coventry University campuses (Scarborough, London and Dagenham).
We are currently in CU Scarborough engaging with staff and students (20-21 March 2017) it has been an exciting visit so far. Students are very engaged with the playful approaches of the different play and game-based workshop tasters we are running, such as Thinking with your hands using Lego, Game design and narratives via our associate (Coventry FabLab), Remixing Play into a GamePlan, narratED (What is your story?), etc.
We visited the Sixth Form college in the afternoon on our first day and the reception was also very encouraging. GameChangers was indeed a hit there, especially with the arts and media (graphics) students.
Mobile GameChangers also allows us to investigate new educational “geography”, which includes mobile and ‘pop-up’ creative spaces for fostering creativity and innovation in learning. We will be back in Coventry next (22-23rd) and will also visit our London Campus in May!
A big shout out to the team Helen Keegan, Luca Morini, Oliver Wood and Peter Coleman!!! ACE!
DMLL has recently received funding from NEWTON UK-SEA (AHRC + MoHE) programme to expand the impact of the GameChangers initiative into South-East Asia. The project is called CreativeCulture, which stands for ‘Creative and participatory transcultural practice and problem solving through game design and computational thinking’and we are collaborating with Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) based in Borneo, Malaysia. This is one of the two new spin-offs of the GameChangers movement initiative.
The partnership will exploit existing expertise at the DMLL and UNIMAS, crossing various disciplines including game-based learning, design and computational thinking, creative economy, social informatics, pedagogy and cultural heritage. Innovative and industry-driven pedagogical approaches developed at the lab will be key to expanding the impact of the community participatory work UNIMAS has been spearheading in Malaysia, especially responding to the need to scale up quality and creative learning across the Malaysian Borneo.
The project was recently kicked off at the DMLL (14 – 17 February) in conjunction with the Remix Play Summit (15 Feb). We have had the pleasure to host Associate Prof Fitri Mohamad, Dr. Jacey–Lynn Minoi and Mr. Terrin Lim at the lab for the whole week, where they have been involved in the programme design sprint for the CreativeCulture programme. The DMLL team will be in Malaysia to conduct a series of workshop and small scale pilot in UNIMAS in August 2017.
We soft-launched the Game Changers Programme at the DMLL Expo on 25th November 2015. I have also talked about it in my recent talks at various events. The programme, which will be officially launched in January 2016 aims to explore, experiment and exploit game design thinking in fostering creative problem solving and cross-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary design collaboration. The overarching pedagogical construct of the initiative is motivated by ‘learning by designing’, which is a project-based inquiry approach.
Problem solving will benefit from the practice of design, which is a non-linear, iterative and incremental process as well as generative and creative. Design thinking has crossed over to learning, where it is a “way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practitioners” (Kelley & Kelley, 2013, pp. 24-25[1]). As it pertains to games, it is a “set of skills, competencies or dispositions relating to the highly iterative collaborative process designers employ when conceiving, planning and producing an object or system” (“Institute of Play,” 2013[2]).
Gamified design programme- Copyrighted 2015
The programme will focus on the design and development of games (analogue or digital) or gamified activities for addressing serious issues/challenges/problems/opportunities. The initial pilot will be a gamified six-week programme that will involve weekly stages (missions) with sub-tasks (quests), where participants can level up based on their level of readiness. The levels and contents are developed based on the holistic and modular model for designing gamified learning that is being developed at the lab. The layers can be visited and re-visited in an iterative and incremental manner to consolidate the design requirements and specifications.
The programme will provide open contents and resources to assist and guide participants and organise open sessions (workshops, speakers, etc.) throughout the process. We will also experiment on ‘Open Badging’ for feedback and the ‘Sprint’ concept for ‘product’ development.
The first phase is open to all staff and students across Coventry University as part of the pilot phase (Jan – March 2016) and will engage key actors from the industry (also open to external experts and organisations in games, design, EdTech, etc to get involved). This pilot will inform the programme’s long-term strategy, which will be open to participants external from the university (see main description, which includes the Research Questions).
Participants will obtain valuable knowledge in creative and collaborative problem solving, experience game design and development process and gain recognition from the industry. This programme will directly support the flip classroom agenda at Coventry University, where lecturers will be able to gamify their subject content and/or teaching practice for instance and involve students and game/gamification experts as co-designers. The programme will produce products such as online and open resources on game design thinking, game prototypes and new model for running this program to support cross-faculty collaboration to be showcased in our next Expo in March 2016.
[1] Tom Kelley and David Kelley, Creative Confidence (New York: Random House, 2013), pp. 21-25
DMLL has recently received funding from NEWTON UK-SEA (AHRC + MoHE) programme to expand the impact of the 
We soft-launched the 
