Tag: design

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Syllabus Design

Last week a colleague and I led a workshop on syllabus design for junior faculty. The workshop focused on a method that I call EA2 — engage, apply, and assess.

First step in building a syllabus for a course is to identify the essential student learning outcomes (SLOs). For each SLO, students:

  1. Engage with corresponding content.
  2. Practice applying knowledge or skills associated with the SLO.
  3. Get assessed on how well they have achieved the SLO.

Here is an example from my comparative politics syllabus:

Red box is the SLO. Blue box is the content. Green box is the exercise in application — an argumentative writing assignment. Purple box is the assessment.

This sequence is used for each of the course’s SLOs, turning the syllabus into a map that shows exactly what the course consists of and why.

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More Changes to a Course on Development, Part 2

My original design for this course included a design thinking component organized in two stages. In the first stage, teams applied SCAMPER to California Water Crisis, a freeware board game. Although the subject of water scarcity was quite relevant to the course, the game’s mechanics were not the most engaging. This should have made it easy for students to think of significant SCAMPER-based improvements, but their recommended changes were relatively superficial. The graded writing assignment tied to this activity also left much to be desired.

In the second stage, students were asked to apply SCAMPER to an existing game other than California Water Crisis. Two problems popped up here. First, teams chose very simple games to modify — think Chutes and Ladders (and without even any awareness of its Indian origins or its connection to British imperialism). Second, although I specifically directed them to place the new game in a specific context, like a city, this didn’t happen.

This time around, I’ll be having students play Stop Disasters and Wingspan. Teams will have to apply SCAMPER to one of these two games. Although they both connect well to the course’s subject, neither game is ideal. Stop Disasters is problematic because it is Flash-based. Wingspan requires, where I work, a significant departmental budget outlay of $100 per game, and I have to purchase five of them. Given the dimensions of Wingspan’s box, transporting all five at once could be a problem. The campus building in which I work is not ADA-compliant (my office, perhaps appropriately, is at the top of what originally was the servants’ stairwell).

Instead of selecting something different for the second design round, teams will stick with whichever of the two games they chose for the first round. While students will be free to choose any subject related to the course for the new game they are designing, it will have to be set in the city in which the university is located. I hope to locate some online data visualizations — maps of flood zones, public transportation routes, property tax assessments, etc. — to help students with this.

After the initial SCAMPER-based redesign, each team will play another team’s game. In an individual writing assignment, students will evaluate the games they played according to the game design principles referenced in the same assignment from last year. I will provide each team with the feedback it receives from the other students.

For the next phase, teams will, I hope, use SCAMPER as a means of applying feedback to improve their game designs. Then there will be another round of play testing, with another written evaluation. I might make this second evaluation a mechanism by which teams earn points on the quality of their games, as assessed by other students. That could heighten students’ investment in the design process. I will probably also need to include a means for students to evaluate the work of their teammates on this project over the semester — something I do regularly in my other courses.

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Hate Group Presentations? Here’s an Alternative

Today we have another guest post from Susan Allen, associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. She can be contacted at shallen [at] olemiss [dot] edu.

Enrollment at the University of Mississippi has grown substantially over the last few years, with my upper division undergraduate courses now often exceeding sixty students each. To shepherd such a large number of students through the research process so that they could eventually write compelling papers, I initially tried using group presentations My hope was that presentations would challenge students to be creative (an explicit grading criteria), improve their ability to speak in front of a group, strengthen their ability to summarize important aspects of their work, and allow students with diverse strengths and weaknesses to step up.

What I got, however, were painful classes of undergraduates awkwardly reading their Power Point slides, mismanaging their time, and complaining noisily about the entire experience – both as participants and as witnesses of their classmates’ efforts.

Enter the research conference, an alternative suggested by a friend in psychology. In addition to writing research papers, groups create posters that are presented at a conference session.

Two class periods are designated for our research conference, and half the class sets up on each day. When possible, I also ask two or three graduate students to join me to interview the students about their work. Students who are not presenting are expected to rank and comment on the day’s posters. The ranking criteria, each on a 1-10 scale, are clarity, creativity, research quality, and group participation. The highest-ranking poster for each session generates extra credit for its designers. Only students who submit rankings for the other students are eligible to earn these points.

I had no idea what to expect for the first iteration of the research conference. The quality and style of the posters varied greatly, but not the enthusiasm with which the students spoke about their research. I was amazed by how excited they were about what they’d learned.

Since then, both poster and paper quality have improved. Designing the posters forces students to boil their work down to its essence, which translates into better organization and flow in their papers. On my end, I’ve learned how to provide clearer directions for and better examples of poster design. While poster printing imposes a cost on students, our library provides this service for a nominal fee. Students also have used local copy shops.

For me, the biggest benefit is being able to hear students talk about their work and learn from them about the development of their topics, how they collaborated, and what sparked the interests of individual students. When I face that stack of research papers at the end of the semester, I don’t dread it nearly as much as I used to because I’ve seen and heard their authors’ sales pitches at the research conference.

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Iterating Student Game Design

More final thoughts on my heavily-revised course on development from last semester: as explained in Parts 4 through 6 below, I included a scaffolded series of assignments on design thinking through SCAMPER, a method for creative problem-solving. In a debriefing discussion on the last day of class, one student expressed frustration that the game she and her team had built was not graded. I only graded how well students had written their evaluations of other teams’ games. 

I thought this was a fair point, and said so. But my past use of peer review of student-designed games had proven to be useless — teams simply gave other teams’ games full marks regardless of the games’ actual quality.  And I really did not want to get involved in the minutiae of assessing the quality of all the games that students had created.

Then I thought of applying the last phase of design thinking — experimentation and iteration — to the problem at hand, and this plan came to mind:

  • Compress teaching about design thinking and the related preparatory assignments into a shorter period of time (e.g., first half of the semester).
  • Teams of student design games. 
  • Each team plays and evaluates a game created by another team.
  • I provide the evaluations of each game to its creators.
  • Each team then uses the evaluations as feedback to improve the design of its game. 
  • There is a second, final round of game play. This time each team scores the other team’s game against a rubric. The rubric focuses on how well the second version of the game incorporated the feedback on the initial design.

This sequence might satisfy students’ expectation that everything they do must be graded. 

Links to the original series on redesigning this course:

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Changing a Course on Development, Part 6

My general approach to teaching is to emphasize the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Creation and evaluation are important. Memorization, not so much. While game design gives students the opportunity to create something connected to course content, they should also evaluate whether what they’ve created is on target. So, as promised in my last post, here is the relevant assignment, due after students play the games that they have designed:

1. Read the rubric below.

2. In the form of a 3-4 page, double-spaced essay, evaluate the game you played that was designed by another team. How well did the game:

Work independently, do not discuss your essay with other students.

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course:

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Changing a Course on Development, Part 5

In my last post in this series, I discussed integrating the SCAMPER technique with student game design via a writing assignment and in-class presentations. I’m a firm believer in the benefits of iteration when it comes to learning, so I’m including a second round of game design. For the second round, students will again use SCAMPER, but this time they will actually build new games. Here is the preparatory writing assignment:

Problem

People frequently do not understand the relationships between economics, politics, and the environment. Games are powerful learning tools, but there are few high-quality games about these relationships.

Solution

Design a game that illustrates a relationship between economics, politics, and the environment.

Apply SCAMPER to an existing game other than the California Water Crisis game  — for example, Risk, Mahjong, Settlers of Catan, or Monopoly — to design a framework for a new game. Choose a topic of interest. Put the game in a specific context, such as “the effects of sea level rise in Boston” rather than “climate change.”

Audience

Write a proposal to Hasbro’s Product Development Division in which you discuss the new game you have designed by using SCAMPER on an existing game. Identify the topic of the new game, what features of the existing game will change, how they will change, and why these changes are beneficial.

After students have submitted their individual proposals, I will again cluster the class into teams. The members of each team will discuss their ideas, decide on a single design to pursue, and create and deliver in-class presentations. I’ve devoted a subsequent class session for teams to physically construct the games and another one for students to actually play the games. Debriefing will occur via another writing assignment, which will be the subject of my next post.

Links to the full series of posts on redesigning this course:

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Changing a Course on Development, Part 4

Despite varying degrees of success in my first-year seminar — which I decided to stop teaching — I’m going to again have students design board games based on course content. But I’m going to organize this process differently than before. 

There will be two rounds of game design and each will use SCAMPER, an acronym for a design thinking technique that I will demonstrate with an in-class exercise. In the first round, each student will complete a writing assignment that applies SCAMPER to the California Water Crisis (CWC) game used by Andrew Biro. Here is what SCAMPER looks like in this context:

  • Substitute: what part of the game can be substituted for some other part?
  • Combine: can two separate processes in the game be integrated into one?
  • Adapt: can an aspect of some other game be adapted for use in this game?
  • Modify: can a process that is part of the game be modified, enhanced, or simplified?
  • Put to other use: can a part of the game serve some other function within the game?
  • Eliminate: can any part of the game can be removed/omitted?
  • Reverse: what happens if some process in the game is reversed?

Here are the directions for the first round’s writing assignment: Continue reading “Changing a Course on Development, Part 4”

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Amoeba Game

I’ve been telling students in my first-year seminar that the design of a good game often simultaneously combines chance, strategy, competition, and cooperation. About a month ago I invented a simple game to demonstrate how this could be accomplished.

I took the class outside, defined starting and finishing lines — about twenty-five meters apart — and divided the class into teams. The game had only one rule: every person on a team had to keep his or her left hand on the right foot of another teammate. First team to reach the finish line “won” the game.  Continue reading “Amoeba Game”

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Enjoyable Cores, Aesthetics, and Narrative

This is part 6 of a six-part series of guest posts by Tomer Perry, Research Associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. He can be contacted at tperry [at] ethics [dot] harvard [dot] edu. Tomer discussed the ideas presented in this blog series at a Stanford MediaX event.

For this final post of the series, I saved the best for last. And by ‘best’ I mean prettiest.

Kemet: a pretty game set in ancient Egypt.

Kemet is a great game but it has very little educational value. Although set in ancient Egypt and incorporating some Egyptian mythology, the game itself has nothing to do with Egypt but weirdly pits players against each other on a sandy board. Yet Kemet teaches an important lesson because it is absolutely beautiful. Like many of the most successful crowdsourced games, players of Kemet use gorgeous miniatures to move around the board. The pyramids players build while playing Kemet are actually 4-sided dice that are rotated to show each pyramid’s ‘rank’. Continue reading “Enjoyable Cores, Aesthetics, and Narrative”

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Choice Points, Outcomes and Chance

This is part 5 of a six-part series of guest posts by Tomer Perry, Research Associate at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. He can be contacted at tperry [at] ethics [dot] harvard [dot] edu.

This post is dedicated to what could be the most important game mechanic: decision-making. One of the main challenges in teaching ethics is connecting moral theories to the kinds of decisions that students are likely to face once they graduate. The issue is not merely pedagogical but also substantial: it’s not always clear, or a matter of consensus, what a given theory would instruct us to do in a specific context. Some theorists think that ethical decision-making is not at all a matter of applying the right theory in the right way but a matter of exercising judgement or exhibiting virtue – you can’t know the right thing to do until you’re actually in the situation to make a decision.

Caverna: a family of dwarves specializing in growing wheat and sheep.

If you’re struggling with these issues, game design can help because games are all about making interesting decisions. Games are basically structures for play and what they structure is usually decision-making; the restrictions posed by well-designed games don’t stand in the way of meaningful decision-making but instead facilitate it. You may be inclined to ask your students a lot of open-ended questions, but if the goal of a class is to force students to confront a difficult trade-off in moral values, you are better off with a restricted set of options. This is exactly why so many philosophers construct bizarre and unrealistic thought-experiments to make their arguments, and it is also why students often try to substitute an easier question for the one that forces the difficult trade-off. Game designers recommend thinking about the choice points you give your students. Instead of leaving it up to students to choose whether to exercise moral judgement, create situations that force it. Continue reading “Choice Points, Outcomes and Chance”