At the last ALT-C conference, Nic Whitton and myself floated the idea of a Games and Learning special interest group (SIG) with the powers that be; to be greeted with much enthusiasm.
Fast forward three months, and a group of researchers and practitioners within higher and further education who all shared an interest in the use of games within learning (either directly, or indirectly through research) met together in a first SIG online meeting. And there was much rejoicing.
Between then and now, we’ve been working on a variety of projects to consolidate our approaches and develop new research and outreach; including creating a web site and membership scheme to allow anyone interested in the area (games for adult learning) to join in. We are pleased to announce that this is now open to all:
What about the pub?
The first challenge: open the Lego packets
Last week, the core members of the SIG met for the first of what we aim to be six-monthly ‘face to face’ events. I hosted at the University of Leicester, and we spent a fabulous 24-hours (including a sleep and university catering-supplied bacon butties) packing in a whole host of work including, but not limited to:
- competing in a lego-building ‘contextual’ challenge
Make my day, punk
- setting out the aims and structure of a planned white paper on games and learning
- discussing Aaron Dignan’s Game Frame (see Nic’s thoughts here, which matched the discussion pretty well)
- pooling research ideas and opportunities
- playing and critiquing my course design board game (very useful feedback) and decamping in the evening for beer and some highly competitive games of Carcassonne, Ruk Shuk and Pass the Pigs.
Playing the course design boardgame
MOERG: Play, Games and Context for Learning 