Learning how to play new boardgames can show us some important things to remember when designing for learning, whether that be for school students, TAFE students, university students or creating training for company employees. Here are three tips to keep in mind:
1. Start with the end
How do you win? That’s often the first thing you want to know when you’re learning how to play a new boardgame. This knowledge can then act as a filter for making sense of the information that comes next. It makes the rules and details make sense.
In an educational context, students often want to know what their assessments are right away. They can then filter information they receive through this knowledge. The resulting effects on learning are called washback. They can be positive or negative or a mix of both, but they are there. If you want big changes in the learning experience you’re providing, look at the way to win. What do your students need to do to get high marks? What do your employees need to do to fulfil their training requirements? This is not something to tack on the end of your learning design, it’s the key factor.
2. There is always a mix of digital and non-digital
Boardgames are often seen as a non-digital space for social interactions, and this is true. However, the digital is never far away. Increasingly, video explanations are supplementing rule books. Games are mixing digital and non-digital in interesting new ways. Dice rolls might be digital or not, selection of who goes first might use paper-scissors-rock or it might use a mobile app like Chwazi.
When you teach in person, it’s important to be mindful of the digital actions of learners. What will your students search on YouTube after school? When you teach digitally, it’s important to be mindful of the non-digital actions of learners. Someone using a computer is using their whole body, not just their mind. How often does their brain need to send a signal to their hand to interact with the content? For how long do their back muscles need to support them to sit still in the same position while their eyes move? When might your learner frown or smile, tense or relax, as they work through the learning content? These movements are not negligible, they are critical design considerations.
3. Just play!
Learning is hard. Sometimes you just have to start playing a boardgame, or even play an entire first game, before you really learn what it’s about and how it works. Some boardgames now provide support for players to get started quicker. For example, Wingspan provides a small deck of starting cards and an instruction card for each player to walk them through their first few turns. In education, this is called scaffolding.
Scaffolding provides support to help you do what you can’t do – yet. It often provides opportunities to practice and learn by doing. Children learn by playing, imitating, trying, and while adults learn differently, important similarities remain. Every apprentice can attest to the power of mimicry and learning by doing. Every PhD student can report on learning by writing, rather than only learning before writing. If you’re asking someone to learn, how can you scaffold them to get started quicker, so they can just play?
Photo by Ugo Mendes Donelli on Unsplash
