Creating and Measuring Collaborative Capacity in a Game?
Creating and Measuring Collaborative Capacity in a Game?
Court Ashbaugh, Head of Senior School, Coast Mountain Academy
Court Ashbaugh
Humanity needs to improve its capacity for collaboration in order to address large scale, complex problems. A game called Collabyrinth has been developed and tested in educational, business, and therapeutic settings that intends to build and measure this capacity. If you own the problem of getting people to work together, this session might be for you.
About the game:
The game requires two players to work together solving analog problems. In the game, each player controls a single tilt axis on a 2D surface; together, the players manipulate a ball through a series of challenges. There is no success in the game without communication, strategy, execution, and collaborative response to the immediate feedback the game provides. Outcomes so far: This session will briefly describe the evolution of the game and then will focus on upon the student and teacher experiences (failures and successes) that have arisen during testing. Data collection techniques and definitions of "collaboration" will be discussed. The main take away is that is possible to build and measure "soft" skills meaningfully in a classroom through the use of games. It is also possible to build social relationships through games especially when the game sidesteps many of the social barriers and hierarchies that classroom environments often reinforce.
Attendee Benefits
The main experience for those who attend this talk is to leave with the idea that we can find meaningful ways to build and measure soft skills and social emotional learning beyond simply talking about these traits with students.
The point of the Collabyrinth experiments is to create metaphors that teachers can use beyond the game itself: What is an analog for physical collaboration? How can you motivate learning even when the activity is perceived as "fun"? What kinds of measurements can students consider as indications of improvement? Using the student-built Collabyrinth mazes as an example, attendees will be prompted to consider: what kinds of games can students (or anyone) build that are expressive.