I firmly believe that learning is inherently fun. Overcoming challenges to level up is what makes games so fun, so why wouldn’t learning itself also be fun?
The current model of state-sponsored education is extremely bureaucratic by necessity and compulsory for students. There’s also no extrinsic rewards or incentives to be a better teacher. This can often result in stultifying learning. The students often feel that they “have to” attend classes, they “have to” do as the teacher says, and they have very little choice or agency in the matter.
To compound the problem, the school administration serves the state and answers to both the school board and the parents, but not the students. The users, powerless children in this case, are secondary stakeholders living by the whims of more powerful adult primary stakeholders.
Having come from the commercial sector or arts industry, and teaching strictly electives as opposed to core classes with strict curriculum expectations, I was allowed to take a very innovative approach to my classes.
As a teenager I was a painfully shy extravert, so I found high school to be a special kind of mandatory social hell. But after having a wonderful experience in art school and learning from truly creative teachers I took on a far more positive perspective towards education. As a working independent adult I find it extraordinarily difficult to gather with friends, at almost every scale whether small groups or big, on a regular basis. But school is an institution that sponsors every student to gather with their friends and collectively pursue interesting subjects in what is perhaps the world’s greatest social experiment ever attempted. A creative arts classroom seemed to me like the perfect laboratory for experimenting with social interactions to promote innovation.
In my research I found that visionaries like Buckminster Fuller, who coined the term, “Design Science,” and David Kelly who founded the D- (Design) School of Stanford university had elevated the role of design from merely designing pretty packaging to fundamentally solving world problems. By introducing design thinking into the classroom my students could transform into innovative problem solvers using the same methodologies as the creative professionals disrupting industries in Silicon Valley.
After teaching in my rural hometown for three years, I taught for a year at a startup that provided robotics, programming, engineering, and maker spaces for homeschool students. Then in 2016 I taught for two years at the project-based learning magnet school called Energy Institute High School in Houston, Texas. This school organized all the classes and curriculum around collaboration between four classroom cohorts. Four different classrooms with four different subjects would each coordinate to work on one project.
In my game design classes we learned a combination of entry-level programming, animation, and game development by designing card games and board games. We especially liked designing tabletop games, which includes everything from board games and card games to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, because their shorter design cycles allowed us to do rapid-prototyping.
Tabletop games are also more social in nature which is a good fit for a room filled with twelve to twenty-four students. Board games and card games are often turn-based, which means they perfectly facilitate social interactions. This is perfect for mediating both socially anxious angsty teenagers, which is redundant so we’ll just call them angsteenagers, introverts who withdraw quietly into invisibility, and overly assertive extraverts who often dominate unstructured social interactions.
I wasn’t really familiar with designer tabletop games, but our research led us down a very elaborate rabbit hole immersed in economic simulations, war games, and adult themed designer board games. These games were rich in strategy, offered difficult choices, and often had moral dilemmas which encourage agency and role playing as critical decision makers.
These designer board games also allowed me to introduce sophisticated economic models without elaborate lectures that would bore my students. By learning the rules of the game, and seeing the emergent strategies, they very naturally came to understand the importance of economic incentives and systems based thinking.
The immediate feedback of games allows for much richer dynamic learning and more accurate evaluations of understanding than your typical drill, repeat, quiz, test, and grade cycle. The steadily growing number of tabletop games in my collection also made my classroom into one of the funnest rooms in the building.
My game design students and I eventually developed our own megagame, a political science simulation event in which up to 72 participants roleplay as world leaders and are given our hours to solve a simulation of all the world's geopolitical problems.
Long before the Covid epidemicI was already posting tutorials to help support student learning beyond the classroom. Later I also condensed my best drawing lessons into short 15 minute videos for those who wanted to learn but didn't attend the school where I taught.
But once Covid did strike, the website became even more important. So we combined it with Discord to create a supportive network with competing teams. We also encouraged sharing thankfulness lists to encourage positive mental health.
An example video lesson from the website.
I also stared a podcast to record brief lessons on interesting subjects and mental frameworks necessary for a creative career. These lessons can all be found at www.BestClassEver.org.
