 Hi, I'm Matt Farber, and I'm going to talk today about student game jams. Game jams are essentially games about making a game. You get a theme, or you get a challenge or constraint, and you riff off of that. It's similar to cooking shows, for instance, chopped on the Food Network. You get a basket, and you get certain food items in the basket, and you must use all those items, and you have to design or cook for somebody else, and they give you a grade, basically, based on a rubric. Some background on myself, I wrote the book Game of Fire Classroom, Field Guide to Game Based Learning, and I also blog for Edutopia on Game Based Learning, and here is my contact information on all the links, including the Moveable Game Jam document, are on the link on the bottom of the screen there. Games basically are systems with interconnected components. You have a goal, rules, components, which are pieces like dice, or pawns, or dots on a screen, core mechanics, and space, which is where the game is played itself, to be a screen, or it could be a basketball court. Games have core mechanics, which set the system of play into motion. The core mechanics mentioned earlier could be trading, voting, or role play. In the classroom, I use this information from the Institute of Play. They have a Q Game Design Pack. I give this to students, and they look at one half here, as an example, off paper scissors, and then they design a game using whatever they design, and they fill it in here. So they have a nice guide, what you do. And then another group does a blind play test. In other words, they must play another student's game without the other student telling them how to play the game out loud. They have to follow the written instructions as if they purchased the game in a store, and see how fun the game is, and how difficult it is to play. The White House actually took this model and hosted a game jam last fall, 2014, where they invited educators, game designers, students, and academics. I'm excited because I have a special guest, Alex Fleming, from mouse.org. He is one of the organizers, along with the Institute of Play, and many other groups in the city to bring about the Moveable Game Jam. And he's going to talk about the Game Jam Guide, which is linked here. So these Moveable Game Jams, they're called Moveable Game Jams because they are in a different place every time that they happen. Sometimes they're in Queens, sometimes they're in the Bronx, or in Brooklyn, or in Manhattan. So there's the location where they are, who they're convenient to, changes every time that we have them. And these Game Jams started as a collaboration between different Hive New York City groups that were all involved in game-based learning in some way, and wanted to collaborate on throwing some really awesome events. So each organization that is a part of the Game Jam would basically bring an activity to the table and lead something about character design or a game story or game art or level design or building blocks of programming. Some skills, some little activity that you could do in under an hour to try your hand at something with game design. And at the start of the Moveable Game Jam, we created this collaborative Google doc. Actually, it's Kevin McClase, who's working at Iridescent at the time, who started this doc. And it's not only just a master list of how you can throw your own Moveable Game Jam with all the information that you would need to figure out how to do the logistical side of that. We also started compiling a list of every single game-making activity that has been used at a Moveable Game Jam since the inception of this project. So if you want to run an activity at a Game Jam, you're excited about it, but you don't know what to do. We've got activities that you could go look up and they have facilitators notes. They have information about how they've worked in previous Moveable Game Jams with notes on how we might want to revise them for next time. And this has been a really awesome living document that has been growing and evolving as we've been having more of these Game Jams. So here it is, the Game Jam Guide. It is a Google doc. You don't need any permission to view the document just to edit it. And what it is, is a shareable document. It's linked. You jump around the document. There's feedback that's saved in the document as well. And it's very useful because not only does it describe how to run different types of stations for instance, Sphero, the robotic Moveable Ball, or Maki Maki, or Scratch, or modding musical chairs. It also includes what works and what didn't. Real reflections from the facilitators of each station. The next Game Jam they're going to host as an extension of the Moveable Game Jam will be the Climate Game Jam, which will take place in fall 2014 here. And it will be hosted by all different places. But you can see there's a big involvement here in out-of-school sites, informal learning spaces such as museums. Last spring I had the opportunity to attend the Game Jam at Quest to Learn. That is the public school in New York City that was founded by the Institute of Play. They have an emphasis of game design and working with interconnected systems, systems thinking approach to using games in the classroom. This was a weekend event, so students there were not necessarily Quest to Learn students. In fact, students came from all over New York to attend and I was a guest as well. So this is my greeting at the door. And here we go. These are children who showed up to the Game Jam event. And what was very exciting was the fact that a lot of the kids here did not know each other at first. They were strangers in fact. And the main activity was to take paper and to turn it into something else. The constraint was to turn it into something else. You see some airplanes flying around here in the front. And that was not always the case. It was basically a certain challenge. And I believe the challenge pose was to use paper, but you were not allowed to use your hands as to create a game about that. So I don't know where the paper airplanes landed. But they were certainly all over the library here. So you could see kids got up, moved around. What's very important in a Game Jam is to remember play. You play within a game. You want to have playfulness. You want to play around the structure of what a game is, but you don't necessarily want it to be overly structured. Games should after all be fun to do. So here's an example of a student who created a game with paper. So they have the parts of a game, as I mentioned earlier, space, the components, the mechanics, catching and throwing. And there were certain limitations. You can't break the plane. Or no hurting. And it's a 3-player game. So one of the stations used floors. Floors is an application that mixes digital and analog. So here what you do is you draw a game level. You take a picture with an iPad using their app. It's from a company named PixelPress. And it'll turn that into a video game level that you can design and play and try. Another room here used musical chairs. And you could see the facilitators and children balancing books on their heads playing musical chairs. So it is, I think, nice when you're mixing in analog and digital. It's not just about the tools themselves. It should be a scratch game design game chip. It should be around a certain theme that you're using tools to create. Just like any other educational technology. There wouldn't be a lesson about the smart board. You're using a smart board to deliver some sort of lesson. So it's similar here. Here's another one. Children are using Mozilla's App Maker, where you can design mock-ups of different apps. And in this particular one, it was a game that they had to change. Here's the classroom at Quest to learn where they were playing around there. And again, it's kind of fun to do. Each session took an hour to do. So why game jam? You know, I know it's fun, right? But what you're doing here is you're exercising in a playful way, 21st century skills. First you have user empathy. So you're designing something for somebody else to use. Secondly, you're going through the iterative design process, where you are making something and then you have to test it. And then you have to try to make it again based on user empathy or feedback. Systems thinking is the idea that everything is interconnected and games are very effective to model interconnected systems. If you add a rule to rock, paper, scissors, you completely change the game altogether. It's a three-person game. If you add something else, rock, paper, scissors, and a ruler, it changes the game entirely. So working with an interconnected system of a game is a playful way to learn that skill. Informational text interestingly comes about in writing down and giving rules to your new game to somebody else to play. That actually is common core skill also, reading and writing technical and informational text. And of course you have user empathy because you're designing a system for somebody else to use, which of course must be fun to do. So what I did was I took this concept this summer to the A. Harry Moore School, posted a game jam there with the teachers. And it's a school for low-incident disabled students. So I wanted to hone in on the idea of playfulness of everyday objects. I use this from the Institute of Play. They have a website up that really gives a lot of ideas for how to mod everyday objects. And I did not do what this picture shows using rubber bands and bottle caps. It looks kind of dangerous. What I did was I used cups as well as ping pong balls, twine, and all sorts of different objects. They were on each table. And in essence by the end of the introduction activity cups weren't just cups. Cups with string became telephones or they became basketball hoops. And I really opened up the room. I hosted the room with Makey Makey and I used bananas and Play-Doh. I really wanted to use tactile elements, very hands-on. And I used a game called One Button Physics, which really requires just, as it says, one button. But it's difficult to play. You bounce a ball here in the purple background and you have to bounce it high enough but then it bounces back and forth to get that target. And then, of course, it gets more difficult. By putting the little alligator clips into a banana, the banana is hacked away from the keyboard. So rather than using the space bar, you tap on the banana and the alligator clips trigger the computers to work. And Makey Makey is really wonderful for something like this. And there's a new Makey Makey that's how that's even easier and lighter to use. It works off of flash drive. I also offered Play-Doh as an option. And Play-Doh, you can design your own keyboard here. So it's really just a little mother board where you put alligator clips and it goes into the computer and whatever you plug it into on the other end could be fruit, could be Play-Doh. We'll turn it into the keyboard. This girl came in and she saw the banana keyboard and she was like, this is all weird. This is awkward. Why would I want to use fruit for my computer? I have a perfectly good keyboard right here. Remember, we're talking about digital natives that grew up with everything completed. You know, you have a phone like an iPhone or an iPad. It's done. There it is in the case. So we have this nice movement away from that. There are kits like Makey Makey, little bits and many, many others in the market where you can kind of deconstruct things the way Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak may have done in their garage back in the 1970s creating the first Apple computer. So here I gave Play-Doh to this girl and she designed her own keypad that she could play pac-band with. And when the whole session was over, she was beaming. This is so cool. I have to get one of these. So she really took ownership of it. She was able to design something of interest and have fun with it, which is really the idea. Play-Doh is more than just Play-Doh. Alligator clips become more than just alligator clips. They become a conduit to fun. Other stations include Compose Yourself, which takes music in little playing cards and you can remix it, turn them upside down, right side up in any order, repeat them, and there's a little code on each playing card and you type it into a website and no matter how you play it, it will play a song that's very nice to hear. You can even download the sheet music and have somebody play it on an actual instrument or you can share it as an MP3. So what this does is it really takes away a lot of the difficulty of playing or composing music. The same way a game design site for kids like Scratch or Hopscotch takes away a lot of the difficultness of coding. You don't have to know a JavaScript or HTML to use that. It's just interlocking blocks. And here it takes that interlocking block approach to music. Sphere was also used. Here's an obstacle course of Sphere. This was also used at Quest to Learn at their game gym day, at their movable game gym day. What was interesting there was that students did not want to do the obstacle course. They wanted to just play around with a robotic ball. And that's perfectly fine. That's the idea. Play. So what I did was I designed one in my classroom. I got rid of a teacher desk after reading a blog post from Nick Parvenzano, who's an Egitopia blog poster like myself. And I don't have a teacher desk anymore. I just have my iPad and laptop and move around the classroom. And here I created a station for kids to design games with as a project-based setting. And here what they do is they brainstorm or IDA. They paper prototype. They play tests and they iterate. So basically it's like a project, project-based learning, where there's centers or stations around a classroom. But rather than turning it a perfectly done scrapbook that some students may have gone to Michaels or Target to purchase, they create something that is not perfect. They create something that others have to test out and provide feedback. And the students get graded on turning in artifacts and going through the process of design, which is a real-world skill. Not just turning in a polished finished scrapbook because they were able to spend more money on stickers at Target. A simple way to create this in a classroom is add a rule, drop a rule. Like I mentioned earlier with rock, paper, scissors to take tack toes is a nice way to do this. What happens if you add a rule and drop a rule to take tack toe? Here's an example of student work. I gave students a constraint to create a fun game about the Revolutionary War battle locations in 45 minutes. Quite difficult. In fact, one student came up to me and she said, Mr. Farber, how do you expect us to do a completed project about this that's actually fun in 45 minutes? I said, I'm not. It's a prototype. And that's kind of hard for some students to wrap their heads around, but that's real-world. That's how Apple and Microsoft and Google and every company actually clothing, right? Everything is updated and pushed out all the time. There's version one, version two, version three. In this game, the students in 45 minutes and they finished that home because they wanted to intrinsically created this game. The blue eraser caps here are the colonial troops. The red ones are the red coats. There are locations on the 13 colonies. There are event cards. Some say it rains or you lose all your food. Some say nothing. Just nothing happens. You never know. It's a chance. When you meet up on the battlefield, if it comes a role-playing game with multi-sided dice and they created an elaborate rule set, mind you, one of the students in the group had an IEP. He had an individualized education plan and this is what he came back with. Other ways to use this, they're a trading card application. Trading card games are very fun and simple to make. Here's one, a sixth grade student made last year for me, turning all of the Mesoamerican civilizations into a trading card game. Thank you so much for attending and listening. I really, really hope you bring the Game Jam model to your classroom. There are tons of really good resources. Here is all my contact information again, as well as the link to the Moveable Game Jam Guide. Thank you so much.