Blockbusting, 3/30
How are you leveraging blockbusting in your thinking (reference class activities and readings as warranted)? What role might form play in your ideas?
After the in-class activities on Tuesday, our group wanted to try out blockbusting for our own project! We loved how this activity encouraged us to push the parameters of both our problem space and our potential solutions. It felt refreshing to challenge our self-imposed limits.
Andrea drew a gridded cube for us to practice Fritz Zwicky’s model of “morphological analysis” for creative problem solving and innovation. The three axes of “noun”, “verb”, and “adjective” helped us to determine form, learner objectives, and modes of learner engagement respectively. For example, our solution might be a game for learners to reflect collaboratively. Or, it could be a digital experience for learners to create in a self-directed manner. We’ve tended to group some of these things together in the past (journals are physical rather than digital, and games must be collaborative).
It was really interesting to break apart these stereotypes. We used the example of a board/card game, an idea we’ve been circling around, to take away some of those prototypical elements. For example, multiplayer games and connections don’t have to take place in one time frame, but may be asynchronous instead to allow learners to share and grow at their own pace. The typical reward systems used in these games could be subverted (incentivizing failure), or done away with entirely. The game’s objectives (building confidence to overcome failures) could reveal itself eventually through gameplay instead of at the outset.
We also engaged in other blockbusting activities such as seeing the problem from different viewpoints. For our team, it was easy to bring back parents and educators as two tangential stakeholder groups we’ve connected to our primary group of college students. Considering the solution from an educator’s priorities was especially helpful! How can the educator guide or partake in the learning experience themselves? How might the solution be incorporated into the classroom setting? What does success look like for each student within the course? The latter questions encourage us to design a final solution that can be flexibly applied to more concrete content. We also revisited some of the students’ priorities. Given how busy we often are, the more clearly we can communicate the context (time commitments, place) and expectations (what, if anything, do I need to prepare for this experience?), the more likely we will be able to meaningfully engage with them.
For next steps, we plan to incorporate some of these new considerations into our existing ideas and continue sketching them out in more detail! We’re really looking forward to prototyping, especially after this week has opened us up to more unconventional final forms.
