Week Four at the ETC is synonymous with Quarter Walk-arounds. Quarter Walk-arounds feature 15-minute rotations of ETC faculty and staff between project rooms. While the faculty are in the room, students give a quick presentation about their project and their direction for the project. The remainder of the time is dedicated to faculty giving their feedback based on the project presentation. It’s a good opportunity to get faculty input without the pressure of grading.
From our faculty we learned:
- We need to better focus our scope and get as specific as possible about our audience and the circumstances of the program we were preparing.
- We need to narrow down where the program would take place, how long it would last, what facilitation for the program looks like, what the students are doing, and what the takeaway from the activity is.
- Multiple faculty members emphasized the importance of providing students with a take-away.
- Brenda suggested looking at the programming like we are organizing a game jam. We could look at specifics about information we give students to build from and where students have freedom to be creative. She also talked about pairing learning the technology with the needs of the project to help students connect the technology as a necessary solution for the project.
- We also got lots of recommendations of good content to consider including: Spaceteam, Servo magazine, Microbits, Rogue Light Games, Values of Play Cards, Oblique Strategy Cards, Sifteo, Rigamajig & Cass Holman’s work, and visiting Assemble.
Following faculty walk-arounds, we spent the week internally playtesting, researching what the faculty had shared, and connecting with more Maker-Learning professionals.
Tuesday we visited Nina Barbuto at the Assemble Makerspace in Pittsburgh’s Garfield Neighborhood. It was great to visit a Makerspace that hosts projects where participants are engaged for a specified length of time working on a specific activity.
- For facilitation, Nina encouraged us to include back-up plans for worst-case scenarios and including room in the facilitation so that facilitators can put themselves in it. Furthermore, the content shouldn’t be higher than an 8th grade level of understanding to avoid facilitators feeling like imposters.
- She shared that Assemble’s survey process includes asking if students can share the skill they learned with others. Part of their facilitation process at Assemble involves asking students to help other students when they have completed their work.
- Nina encouraged us to try to support lots of different learning styles in our project
- She helped us come up with a general curriculum outline and also shared Assemble’s curriculum template. She mentioned including an ice breaker to build community in the group and get everyone hooked. It can also help break up the time and support kinetic learning
- Nina also shared Assemble’s programming schedule with the team and agreed to let us playtest in the space.
Thank you to Nina for sharing the Assemble space with us! We had a great time and it was a great opportunity to learn more about open-ended maker-education in Pittsburgh.
The following morning, Marissa met with Ani Martinez from Remake Learning. Ani is the Field Director for the Remake Learning Network and helps to connect makers and facilitators with resources in Pittsburgh.
- Ani gave us a great list of locations where we could potentially playtest. She also gave us additional professionals to reach out to with questions.
- Ani suggested testing our interaction at different sites to further bolster our data and research. She recommended testing with a group that had a variety of ages, testing in a registered club (with a consistent audience), and testing in a drop-in location like a library.
- She shared that tablets are the most intuitive technology and kids can readily navigate them.
- She also emphasized that kids want to express themselves and be in charge of their learning, so our role is to give them guardrails like a story, challenge, or competition that they can create in.
- She encouraged us to explore the space of creating a resource for facilitators that could put what’s available for programming in one place.
The rest of Wednesday we hosted “Camp STEAMineer”. The afternoon served as an opportunity to learn more about our subject matter by playing. To get started, we colored with crayons. We colored gears with why we cared about the project written on them. We also colored ginger-bread like figures based on ourselves.
Some of our coloring projects, including our tower drawings at the bottom.
Next, we took pictures for our team photo. We took individual photos in front of a green screen posing like what we wanted to be when we grew up. It proved to be a tremendous amount of fun and we laughed a lot. See below for outtakes and our final team photo. The photo gets displayed with other photos of current project teams at the ETC.
After our photoshoot, we playtested part of the “Building With Materials” curriculum from Two-Bit Circus. The curriculum has enough content for multiple lessons, so we selected the “Designing Towers” activity and the “Building A Tower” activity for our camp. Everyone drew a picture of a tower they would design if they could. We discussed our drawings including what materials we would use.
For the second part of the activity we broke up into two teams of 3: First Years vs. Second Years. We had 25 minutes to construct a tower using string, cardboard, recycleables, tape, paper, and hot glue. The tower needed to be free-standing and had to be at least a meter tall. Isabel, Yifan, and Mia built a sleek, sky-scraper like tower complete with architectural details made out of yarn. Max, Mimi, and Marissa created a tower with a wide base constructed of stacked cardboard triangles with paper strips for decoration. This playtest gave us a unique opportunity to compare how both of our teams worked. Isabel, Yifan, and Mia’s team took a more calculated, thoughtful approach. Their construction seemed less hectic compared with Max, Mimi, and Marissa’s all-hands-on-deck at all times approach. This also gave our team a good chance to experiment with different materials and see how things can be used in surprising ways. Yarn worked effectively to convey the windows or beams you might see on a skyscraper. Cardboard can be interlocked so that it can stand on its own.
Max, Mimi, and Marissa’s Tower 
Mia, Yifan, and Isabel’s Tower
After our building, we sat down as a team to watch a GDC talk. Stone Librande teaches Game Design at the ETC’s campus in Silicon Valley. In 2012 he delivered a talk called “Designing Games for Game Designers”. His talk focused on activities he uses in his class to help students learn about good techniques for making games. He starts the talk with a focus on game structure. Here is a diagram of the system he uses to describe games:
He encourages each of his students to treat each element like the intensity or level of it can be scaled up or down. It’s in this scaling of elements that games can be strengthened and made more effective. He also has his students start with no technology and a simple interaction. Later projects start to involve more of the elements of a game and will even focus on heightening individual elements.
If you’re interested in the activities he teaches or learning more about his approach, check out his talk here: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015305/Designing-Games-for-Game
After watching Stone’s talk, we played the game “Making Connections”. Making connections is a card game developed for the Children’s Museum MAKESHOP staff. It is based on a game designed by ETC Project team Aristeia. (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/aristeia/) The game involves three kinds of cards: Facilitation Strategy, Learner Type, and Learning Practice. We played by having each teammate hold 5-6 Facilitation Strategy cards in their hand. Each round, we would lay down a new Learner Type and Learning Practice card. Each teammate took a turn laying down a Facilitation Strategy that they felt could be effective for the Learner Type and Learning Practice. It gave us the opportunity to learn more about the ways content can be made uniquely accessible.
Thursday we researched independently to brainstorm specific activities based on our learnings from “Camp STEAMineer”. Our goal was to develop an activity we could create for our project. We shared our ideas on Friday as a team and gravitated in three directions. We liked the idea of using Arduino inputs to impact and interact with a game. We liked the idea of non-simultaneous game-play and having the game be collaborative. As a team we decided to focus on “Collaboration” as the primary skill of the 21st Century Learning Skills we wanted students to takeaway from our transformational experience.
Friday we had faculty sit-downs based on Quarters with Drew and John. Drew encouraged us to look into the Gamestar Mechanic and to look at the mechanics of TikTok as a way for making our interaction more accessible. He also recommended reaching out to students for ideas, input, and inspiration. John pointed out the need for clarity and specifics in our website, as well as contact information and media captions. He also encouraged us to clarify a client for our project since Two Bit Circus Foundation is our partner. He suggested talking to Dave (he pitched our project) and having separate meetings with Dave playing the role of the client to help better direct our approach.
Following sit-downs, we met with Eric Brown, the director of the ETC’s Alice program. Eric creates resources for facilitators and has experience facilitating programming for students. Alice specifically supports students’ creation of video games and digital interactions. Eric re-iterated the importance of scaffolding our content for facilitators. He encouraged us to provide students with moments for customization to help encourage buy-in and to be clear with the students about the goals of the activity so that additional information wouldn’t interfere with initial design choices. He also encouraged us to use the approach of working backwards from the product students will make. With the emphasis and importance on a takeaway for students, identifying what the takeaway could be before planning out the activity would ensure the takeaway is meaningful.
Stay tuned for next week when we meet with our partner, Two Bit Circus Foundation, and narrow the focus of our project activity.