Serious Play Conference

Saturday:

Three Skill Based Workshops, the Demo of an Authoring Tool that Lets You Create Your Own Training Videos and
A Full Day of Games Developed for Classroom Use

Purchase skill development workshops separately.  These special sessions are not included in a Main Conference Registration.
Teacher Play Sessions are free for all Conference participants.

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Workshop: Create a 3D Interactive Environment for Self-Directed Learning Using Unity

An All Day Learning for Educators and Entrepreneurs

10 a.m. – 4 p.m. – Saturday

Beginning Skill Level


Instructor: Dennis Glenn, President and Chief Learning Officer | Dennis Glenn LLC Adjunct Professor, DePaul University Graduate School for Continuing and Professional Studies  This workshop is for educators with minimal or no game development skills to create a museum styled environment where learners are able to navigate your curriculum in a self-directed non-linear progression. The Unity platform lets learners dive into interactive worlds and explore complex scenarios and concepts in completely new ways and teach users how to use Unity to create interactive products and experiences in 2D, 3D, AR and VR.

Clayton Christensen in his prescient book, Disrupting Class, stated: “student-centric learning opens the door for students to learn in ways that match their intelligence types in the places and at the paces they prefer by combining content in customized sequences.” Self-directed learning takes advantage of the research on distinctive intelligences by Howard Gardner. Christensen used Gardner’s research when he posited: “when an educational approach is well aligned with one’s stronger intelligences or aptitudes, understanding can come more easily and with greater enthusiasm.”

Almost 100 years ago the movie industry faced a massive disruption by the introduction of sound synchronized to the action. Often called “talkies” the industry had to make radical technological and infrastructural adaptations to their entire creation and distribution channels.

In 2020 the entire world is now faced with the most serious disruption of every aspect of their lives. Our communication, learning, and social systems must now address a radical and rapid transformation to respond to this contagion. McKinsey asks this question, “We have a group of employees capable of doing something today. How can we ensure they’re able to do something different tomorrow?” This is where student-centric learning environments generated by game engines will lead this new disruption. In a recent MIT Sloan School Management Review Research the authors found that “Serious business leaders worldwide accept that their markets, customers, and workers have gone digital. In our recent global management survey, 93% of workers across industries and geographies affirm that being digitally savvy is essential to performing well in their role.”
This workshop will provide each participant a working model of a completed museum created by me with coding and curriculum examples included. Additionally, each participant will be able to at no cost use this Unity model to create and distribute their customized learning environment to their students. 

At the start of this workshop each participant will:


At the end of the workshop each participant will:

  • How an introduction to the navigation of the Unity ecosystem so that they can find content and resources
  • Gain familiarity with the Unity platform by creating their own project
  • Register for a no cost one-hour personalized project review with me at your convenience

Resources to be downloaded before the workshop:


5 hour Workshop: Beginner Level.
June 26
Cost: $350.00.

Sample Model Video
https://youtu.be/DCnFjE56-_k

Class Size Limited. Register Early


Dennis Glenn, MFA is President of Dennis Glenn LLC, has an interactive learning and assessment company and is currently an adjunct professor at DePaul University Graduate School Continuing and Professional Studies.

His instructional design and eLearning experience was honed when he joined Northwestern University as assistant dean for distributed education at the School of Communication where he was the Director of the Distributed Learning Center. Dennis has designed interactive virtual patients for the medical industry that assess the cognitive decision-making abilities of surgeons, doctors, and nurses. He has created learning and assessment simulations for Pearson Learning, Baxter, Abbott Labs, American Association of Nurse Anesthetists and over 25 medical schools.

He has taught at Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and DePaul’s Graduate School for Continuing and Professional Studies, where he currently teaches in two domains: Engaging Social Media, and Mastery Learning Using Serious Games. 

Additionally, Dennis has presented his research at the following conferences:

  • Serious Play Conferences 2017, 2017, 2019
  • GamiCon 2021
  • American Association of Nurse Anesthetists Assembly of School Faculty 2018
  • Society for Simulations in Healthcare 2013, 2017, 2021
  • Annual DePaul University Teaching and Learning Conference 2016
  • Chicago eLearning and Technology Conference 2014, 2015, 2019
  • Association of Program Directors in Surgery 2012, 2014
  • Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference 2012

Adding Accessibility to Serious

Games

10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. – Saturday, Eastern Time

Instructor:
Dr. Paul Pivec, Director | CranberryBlue R&D | Austria  

 

The concept of accessibility focuses on enabling access to your game for people with impairments, or special needs, or enabling access through the use of assistive technology.

The Accessibility module for Game Creator provides as many features as possible without the need for assistive technology.  The components can also be utilised in other ways to create additional features that are not normally provided to the player.

Accessibility is strongly related to universal design which is the process of creating products that are usable by people with the widest possible range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations.  This is about making your game accessible to all people (whether they have a disability or not). This course will focus on how to implement Accessibility features into a game and provide choices to the player through the User Interface. All participants will receive a workbook detailing all the examples.

The Learning outcomes for this course are as follows:

• Knowledge and use of Game Creator Accessibility Module
• Adding Accessibility controls to the game UI
• Creating configurable UI controls
• Providing Color Processing for user configuration
• Adding in-game sound with closed captions
• Configuring player controls for special needs

A Certificate of Completion will be presented at the end of the course.

For this course, you will need a licensed copy of the following assets:

• Game Creator (which should have from previous courses)
• Accessibility Module for Game Creator
• UI Components for Game Creator

Please purchase these using the product page on this site.

You can also play the demo game (that you will be creating) on this link: https://engagelearning.eu/accessibility/index.html

Minimum number of attendees needed – 6
Maximum number for class – 25

This course has been scheduled for Saturday the 26th of June 2021. It is strongly suggested that the Creating Serious Games using Game Creator is completed or complete the half day Boot Camp course prior to this course.

FREE SPONSORED SESSION 

Editor: The Real Game-based Learning Authoring Tool

10 a.m. – 1 p.m. – Saturday

Instructor:
Fanny Sieminski

Technology Evangelist
Gamelearn

This session will address the use of Editor, the authoring tool that allows you to create quality training video games without any technical programming knowledge. During this DEMO, attendees will learn how to use all the tools that Editor provides to create educational video games. First, we will cover all the parts of the tool. Then we will cover the steps needed to create a structure for the course with the principles of game-based learning methodology; the story draft and the game mechanics.

The attendees will learn step by step how to use Editor, our authoring tool that helps you create videogames without a single line of code. During this session, we will cover all functionalities and assets of the authoring tool and we will explain how to make the most out of them. Once we have presented the possibilities Editor can offer, we will create, along with the attendees, a small piece of a course to learn how to use scenes, characters, objects, triggers, and loops.

You can design 100% customizable and engaging courses using the Editor. Build courses from scratch or use our tried-and-true templates, which can be modified at any time. Manage every aspect of your clients’ training needs directly from the platform and access analytics to accurately measure the impact of your training.

All attendees will receive a discount code giving them access to our Masterclass run by Gamelearn Academy (normally valued at €595) for just €199