Blockbusting Continued
After class on Tuesday, we were given another blockbusting activity to complete that was intended to help us look at different perspectives and consider other aspects of the experience that hadn’t been designed for. During our last meeting, we spent most of the time fleshing out details for our experience in the context of an online or in person learning game, however towards the end of the experience we realized that maybe our idea might best be presented as a workshop rather than a game since our experience, although it may have many rules and exercises/activities, doesn’t have a lot of game components like a clear way to win or assess if they are winning at different points in the game. Either we would need to flesh out the game components so that it would feel like a successful game and successful systems thinking learning experience or find another way in which to contextualize our experience so that the gains of systems thinking and the experience itself are clear. I think we did this by connecting it to Ideo which we talked about in the last post, but going into this blockbusting activity having already found some issues with our experience encouraged us more to think outside of our experience as a game. The activity was broken into 6 sections related to things that could be blocking our progress.
1 & 2. Move beyond stereotypes and isolate the problem
Through our previous research, we tried to find out more about the assumptions we had about our learners and systems thinking. We found out that systems thinking was fairly unknown to students and that students want to make a positive impact on the world. In the ‘Filling the Gap’ exercise we discussed ways in which we could resolve issues like students or teachers not knowing how to do systems thinking or make a positive impact by lowering the barrier/making initial tasks easier and then building them up to more difficult tasks. Although this is something we considered early on, we hadn’t thought about how to use it in the experience we are currently designing for. The order in which we introduce activities is important because if they don’t know systems thinking already we don’t want to overwhelm them from the very beginning of our experince.
3. Effectively delimit the problem area
In this step, we looked at the perspectives that out topic could be looked at and thought of what learning experiences would be appropriate based on on these perspectives. We felt that systems thinking was moderately important and moderately difficult to understand, or at least that the experience we design so far reflected those perspectives, so we decided to branch from them and look at the extreme ends of the spectrums. We came up with some interesting ideas ranging from party games and crosswords to standardized testing. We liked the idea of a party game because it might help with lowering the barrier which was a concern from earlier.
4. See problems from various viewpoints
We looked at the concerns of the people who could potentially be involved if this was a workshop. The main concerns we had found were actually from the parents. We want to expose students to potentially controversial topics and some parents might not be okay with this because it conflicts with their views. We also felt that we needed to figure out that if this is a workshop that comes to certain schools, how much do teachers need to know about systems thinking and handling controversial topics with students beforehand as well as how involved would teachers be. We realized that teachers may need some training in how to engage with students on controversial topics and the the context of the experience would need to be framed in a less controversial way.
5. Recognize and correct saturation
From the experience we’ve designed so far, we haven’t given students the chance to consider their own personal values. Our experience has them roleplay as a specific stakeholder in the system so they are putting out ideas and opinions from the perspective of someone else. We felt it was important that they reflect on the activity they did and how it aligns with their personal values. We thought of incorporating a personal diary or journey mapping activity that would allow them to see how they contributed to the workshop and reflect on the steps they’ve taken.
6. Utilize senses you have ignored
We realized that we had majorly ignored a lot of the senses in designing our experience so far. The game was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons which relies heavily on imagination for moving the experience forward. If we do this as a workshop though, we could have workshop leaders bring in artifacts to help contextualize for students the the scenarios that they’re in (pollution that they can smell or prison food they can taste).
Takeaways
Overall, I think that this activity was very beneficial because it allowed us to see issues that might arise if we were to run our idea as it was and think about ways to solve them. I’m not sure if we will touch on everything that we came up with in the block busting activity since we’ve definitely forgotten about some of the ideas we had early on which became evident from this activity. Even so, I think it was good to recall certain things that we had discussed earlier and look at the stakeholders we had already established in a different way.
