Our Design Jam

03/17 — Motivation, the Magic Circle, and midterm presentations

🔷 Presentation feedback:

Overall the concept and direction are well received. Our classmates seem to understand the value of teaching these skills. There are a few things we need to define more clearly and possibly revisit. Such as:

Possible learning theories to revisit to structure our thinking.

• Get more specific with content. Write out component skills in steps with overarching vision. Possibly through revisiting some of the learning theories such as the learning gaps & 6 facets of understanding. Additionally, the structured flow of goals and clarifying learning objectives (see image on the left) will aid us in creating a more visual overview plan.
• Think about how we will measure progress and provide feedback loops to our students.
• A lot of our component skills are about understanding and knowledge-based. We need to be more specific about how might we move from understanding to doing using action-based activities.

What worked well:

• Design Jam board and initial concept sketch helped us explain a little clearer which direction we imagine our project going.
• The survey brought our assumptions to life — and set a solid basis for why we are pursuing this idea.
• Using visual imagery to explain concepts — such as our CLA iceberg image.

Initial concept sketch

🔷 What ideas are you proposing for the learning experience you’re designing based on Ambrose’s Model of Motivation and Salen/Zimmerman’s Magic Circle? What role might form play in your ideas?

Our Miro board exercise for understanding how the principles of motivation apply to our concept

🔸 Ambrose's Model of Motivation:

Using this model has helped us think about our wording and to deeper define our concept. I think we were struggling a bit with filling this out in the beginning because our vision for our concept is not as defined as we would have liked yet. Doing this activity, however, has forced us to make some decisions about the format of our game. However, I think we need to take a step back and revisit the learning experiences mentioned as feedback to our presentation. Some useful insights we gathered from doing this activity and questions we want to explore further are:

• The importance of collaboration and teamwork as a value as well as an expectancy.
• What role will personal reflection play in learning about worldviews? What would that look like as an activity? Will it be effective as a way to teach about systems thinking?
• How might we leverage the value that people might have regarding having an impact on their surroundings, contributing meaningfully to their communities?
• How might players be rewarded for the interventions they come up with?

🔸 Salen/Zimmerman’s Magic Circle:

This model has been really useful because we are thinking about our learning experience as a game. The reason we are gravitating towards gameplay is because system thinking usually addresses dense wicked problems. Using a “synthetic world” will allow users to have a safe space in addressing these problems and learning about them. Additionally, a large part of systems thinking is stakeholder relations and gameplay lends itself extremely well to any kind of role-playing activities. Additionally, Salen and Zimmerman’s model raised questions for us such as:

• What role does time play in our game? Systems thinking is a slow process, how could our game reflect that portion of reality?
• How do we get people to move back and forth, in and out of this synthetic world, and apply what they learn in the real world?
• How open or closed do we want our gameplay to be?

These are questions we are still thinking about and hope to answer in the coming weeks.