Phylo: A Crowdsourced Biodiversity & Science Trading Card GameDavid NgPhylo (
http://phylogame.org) is an exercise in crowd sourcing, open access, and open game development to create a trading card game (TCG) that makes use of the wonderful, complex, and inspiring things that inform the notion of biodiversity. Beginning as a reaction to the following nugget of information: “Kids know more about Pokemon creatures than they do about real creatures,” this project has grown to broach elements of game based science education, ecological literacy, and hackathon mechanics within the teaching community. Given its flexible and open workflow, Phylo has benefited from the input of many communities of expertise, and many collaborations (both formal and spontaneous) leading to a continually expanding resource that is under constant reiteration.
Teaching Bad ApplesAnthony Betrus, Nate Turcotte, Matt LeifeldTeaching Bad Apples is a game developed in 2014 for current and future teachers. It plays much like Apples to Apples or Cards against Humanity, with each player in turn reading a situation card, followed by the other players choosing their response cards. Each situation, however dramatic or bizarre, is authentic, obtained through crowd-sourcing, social media, and online teacher forums. After many play tests, including feedback from practicing teachers and teacher educators, we concluded that the most effective way to teach people to deal with these dicey situations is to have players provide wildly inappropriate responses to the authentic situations, and then in the debriefing talk about "what you would really do." Effectively the game teaches by counterexample, and by making light of these situations it breaks down conversation barriers, and then gets into authentic and appropriate reactions.
Incorporating Twine Game Design Units in Different SettingsMark Chen, Victoria Stay
This is a story about learning to create a navigable story using twinery.org with a group of adolescents in LosAngeles. Like any good story, it's a developing trilogy, involving four intersecting but unique groups with different traits and access to resources. Our journey developing curriculum and learning how best to create twines with each group has been nuanced and continues developing. Twine are lo-tech, choose your-own-adventure, digital narrative games. Integral to twines and this story are the many media that may be used to tell a story. Our adolescent were free to use written word, digital photos, photos taken of hand-drawn pictures, transcribed spoken word, flowcharts, or any combination therein. Where the goal of designing games and narrative is to give voice to the participants, Twine and multi-modal media for storytelling provide an especially empowering experience that may also help participants learn about systems, develop agency and enable learning.
