Game Changer Chicago Development Blog

Behind-the-scenes look at Game Changer Chicago's development process.

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Hexacago Health Academy’s Showcase: Final Board Games (Ashlyn Sparrow)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Ashlyn Sparrow who is the Lab Director of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.

On July 24th at 3pm, parents and The University of Chicago staff and members of the community visited Hexacago Health Academy’s Showcase. For the last three weeks, youth worked hard researching health topics and turning them into board games.  The four resulting games are:

Chicago Clinics by Pyramidz

Players work as doctors attempting to treat or cure patients with different STIs by randomly drawing “patient” character cards.  Each player, in turn, rolls a die to move his or her patients around the board.  If the player lands on a specific STI space, they must answer a trivia question.  For every correct answer, players keep their cards with STI information, representative of becoming a specialist in a certain disease.  Players also accumulate tokens to be used at the clinic to treat patients.  Incurable STIs require more tokens to provide the proper treatment. To provide treatments, or cures, each doctor must return to their home clinic.  This team is focusing on providing basic health information to peers that play their game.   

I Didn’t Do It by Rubics Cube

Each player has a set of 5 narrative cards.  The first player to play all 5 of their cards, completing the narrative for their character, wins.  Players can only play their card if they enact the scene that the narrative describes with the character pieces on the board, which represents the shared living space of the characters.  Each narrative is different.   For example take one of the cards that begins the story of Sabrina:

 “Sabrina was fighting with her mom since she decided to go to a Christmas party instead of coming home. At the Christmas party Sabrina and Audrey got into a fight.“

To play these cards, the player must place Audrey and Sabrina at the correct locations on the board, as listed on the card.

“Three best friends of the house must get to Jennette’s house.  Sabrina was pacing back in forth in the living room.” So you had to move Sabrina to the living room and the other characters outside her door.

I Didn’t Do It is trying to get its players to realize that you cannot tell by a person’s story whether or not they will become pregnant. Life style choices indicate a chance that you will get pregnant but anyone who has sex can get pregnant.  

 UFObesity by Countrixx

In this quirky game, players are trying to escape from a city overrun by aliens who are trying to eat them! Players attempt to reach their character’s weight loss goal while escaping the city. To do so, players must defeat aliens that guard gates preventing access to parts of the board.  There are three aliens, representative of different obesity-related problems a person might face. They are: illnesses, fat shaming, and enabling friends. To break through these protected gates, players must complete trivia questions and gain support cards that will help defeat the aliens. The goal of this game is focused on escaping a cycle of childhood obesity and each player getting their weight down to a healthy level.

Moving Too Fast by Triangle x

Players take on the perspective of a teen, balancing extracurricular activities, social events, jobs, schoolwork, and even sexual activity. All players start by drawing a goal card such as becoming employee of the month or becoming prom queen.  To meet these goals players draw one of three cards: study, work, and class. Study cards give players class credits, which will move them to the next grade level. Work cards allow the players to earn money. Social cards are the most unique, earning players extra credit to be shared with another player, popularity points, and potential relationships. Pregnancy is a risk, however, and may potentially slow the players down. Regardless of your player’s fate, the ultimate goal is to graduate with a high school diploma.  This team is exploring how a teen would balance pregnancy, and attempting to show their peers that they can still go to college or accomplish their goals.

The showcase began in the Logan Center (915 E 60th St) room 901 from 3:00pm – 5:00pm. 

All our students earned digital badges that linked them to learning pathways all across the city of Chicago under Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s initiative: the Chicago City of Learning .  Through this site, youth can continue learning about design, coding and health with partnered organizations.

In the coming weeks, facilitators will debrief on the summer experience in order to improve the program for next year while our researchers will begin looking over interviews and surveys to test whether this program increased interest in STEM careers. 

This year has been an excellent learning experience for youth and for us! Thank you all for following Hexacago Health Academy. Special thanks to Aramark for providing free lunches for our program!

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Using Research in Hexacago Health Academy (Lucy Hebert)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Luciana Hebert who is a Research Specialist at the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) and the Section of Family Planning and Contraceptive Research at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on sexual and reproductive health among adolescents and young adults.

One of the most central motivations for hosting a summer program that exposes youth to game-based learning and STEM careers is the desire to explore how an experience like this can affect a young person’s goals for the future and ability to realize them. Beyond functioning as a supportive and creative space for youth to learn, develop new skills, test bold ideas, fail or succeed, and ultimately grow, the summer program offers a chance for the study team to examine how Hexacago Health Academy might build confidence and self-efficacy, interest in STEM, and knowledge and empowerment around the health of oneself and one’s community.

We are employing a number of different methods in order to evaluate the program’s impact.

First, at the beginning of the program, each participating young person completed a survey assessing health topics taught in school, health knowledge, future college and career aspirations, social support, and critical thinking skills. These same measures will be assessed again at future time points, either at the conclusion of the program, or 6 or 12 months post program completion. Down the road, we will look for changes in self efficacy, career interests, and mentorship by comparing these data points to the baseline information, which youth provided on their first day of the program. This kind of inquiry is termed quantitative research, specifically longitudinal survey assessment, and will be used so that we can track progress and changes in the youth’s lives relative to before participating in the program.

Second, we are also employing two forms of qualitative research methods that will serve to complement the numbers and give greater insights into how participating youth view the program and its impact “in their own words”. Throughout the program youth will complete a series of “digital journals” that ask them to respond to a given prompt. These prompts include scenarios such as communicating the top health need in one’s community to an alderman and discussing why high school STEM classes are important for all youth. These digital journal sessions encourage participating young people to reflect on their experiences in the program thus far, and put into words and inspire into actions the skills and interests they are cultivating through the program.

The second type of qualitative research method we will employ is in-depth, structured interviews. Through one on one interviews with research staff, each participant will answer questions ranging from how they will use what they have learned in the program in the future, what plans they are making to connect with mentors, and how they would change the program itself. These open-ended questions will allow the researchers to evaluate how youth themselves understand and express the influence of the program in their own lives and future goals.  This kind of methodology will provide the research staff with the opportunity to delve deeper into areas that are most important, interesting, or compelling to each individual participant, and to learn ways that they youth believe the program can be improved.

Through these complementary and varied research methods we hope to get a full picture on how games, STEM exposure, and health and science learning delivered via a summer program can empower youth around science, engineering, technology, and math. Ultimately, our findings from this work will show why summer programs like Hexacago Health Academy are important, and how the skills youth develop and connections they make can help build pathways for them to realize bright and productive futures for themselves and their communities.

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Games as Means of Communication (Keith Wilson)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Keith Wilson who is a design fellow at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. Keith received his MFA from Chicago State University

One of my earliest memories involves jumping on the backs of turtles and kicking their shells into an infinite abyss. I spent hours every day playing Super Mario Bros., getting better and better at stomping goombas, collecting mushrooms and coins, and leaping to the tops of flagpoles. And I think that these are often the kinds of escapist situations many Americans, gamers included, imagine when games are dismissed as meaningless entertainment. After all, what could I have possibly learned about the “real world” from an 8-bit plumber’s pursuit of a gigantic turtle king? Still, it’s important to note that I was playing with the original Nintendo Entertainment System before I ever stepped foot inside of a classroom. And I remember sitting next to my little brother, explaining the dialogues of Final Fantasy, which was a story-based game that came out before he had even learned to read.

So this ubiquity of games in everday life (including for youth) raises the question: Do games mean anything?  Can they?  Should they?

These are precisely the questions the youth we’ve been working with during the Hexacago Health Academy have been grappling with. But they can be difficult questions to raise, since most of us are accustomed to thinking of games as entertainment-based forms of escape. Peter McDonald and I have been leading game design workshops as a means to teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) topics, particularly those surrounding sexual and reproductive rights.  The youth are designing games surrounding these topics, and one of my roles in this process is getting the youth to understand the process of designing “successful” games.  A successful game is hard to define, but it might be a game that includes some or all of the following: it is fair, fun, engaging, or educational.

One of our early exercises involved modifying games with which the youth were very familiar.  First, they were asked to add rule changes to the card game Uno (house rules are proof that game design is an intrinsically human practice: nearly everyone alters games to make them more fun). This exercise went off without a hitch, and every team was quickly playing new games based on the Uno model of rapid “attacks” against the other players. The youth were to make serious games (games whose primary purpose is not entertainment, but instead is often educational or instructional).

In the process of designing their games, the students have been conducting research. Previously, the students had been to see presentations given by health professionals in a number of fields, and had learned about a number of different topics concerning contraception, STIs, and other health topics. The youth were asked to turn their newly modded Uno games into games that were “about” something related to their research—they were going to make their first serious game. The team I worked with decided to make their game about STIs. Each number card represented an STI that the player had, and cards that forced a player to draw cards meant that the player was contracting more STIs.  The goal of the game, of course, was for each player to rid themselves of all their STI cards. This was a fun game, since it was very similar to Uno, a game the team enjoyed very much. But was it about something?  This paraphrased dialogue is what followed:

“If I play ‘draw 2 cards’ on a player, that means I'm giving them 2 STIs?”

“Yes!”

“So does that mean that this game encourages people who have STIs to spread them to others in order to win?”

“Oh...”

Without mentioning “procedural rhetoric,” or “ludo-narrative dissonance,” or any of a number of other academic terms for the ways with which games express meaning, the youth were realizing that they already had a grasp of games as a means of communication. If the goal of the team’s game was to encourage safe sex, or to learn how to treat STIs, or to learn how STIs are spread, then Uno might not be the best model. Finding a better model, or altering Uno enough that it allows for teaching moments, is a different battle than this first attempt to understand that games are not only escapist fantasies. But using Uno, a simple and abstract card game, we have been able to begin to connect the dots between that part of us that understands games as being primarily about the fanciful destruction of turtles, or forcing another person to pick up a particular number of cards and the part of us that recognizes that games are profoundly meaningful experiences (or, at the very least, that they are capable of this).

Games connect us to each other, and they allow us to role-play and try new experiences without having to suffer the consequences of those actions in our real lives. And in much the same way that a teacher learns every day that they teach their students (I know this is true of my experience with the extremely bright group of teenagers I have been working with these past two weeks), the youth are learning about the world they are simulating in their games. The public at large may not always see games as practical activities, but the youth in our summer program are consistently proving, through their imaginatively designed games and their own growth as critically engaged young men and women, that games are capable of much, much more.

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Game Design as Interdisciplinary Skill-Building (Maha Ahmed)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Maha Ahmed who is a youth facilitator and an undergraduate at the University of Chicago majoring in Sociology and Public Policy .

We hear it all the time: “I suck at math;” “I’m no good at science;” “Numbers are not my thing.” The list of discouraged feelings surrounding STEM field—science, technology, engineering, and math—goes on and on. Yet in a world of increasingly blurring lines between different professional practices and academic disciplines, hating math and underperforming in science does not mean what it used to.

Through Hexacago Health Academy (HHA), high school youth participants are not only exploring the sometimes-abstract science that comes with understanding complex health issues like disease transmission and viral counts; they are also discussing the social conditions that create patterns in the populations whom these health issues disproportionately affect and why. All of this culminates in them unearthing their inner creative powers in order to tell stories they come to realize needs to be told about their own communities. Game design itself is about telling some sort of story, in a sense engaging at once the literary and poetic parts of one’s mind in addition to the technical and practical.

Additionally, while the primary focus of HHA is to promote the STEM-based learning methods that many youth despise, what these young game designers are perhaps unintentionally discovering and using along the way are the critical thinking skills necessary in almost every academic discipline. In educational game design, art meets storytelling meets research meets sociological awareness.

As a youth facilitator, my role is to lead my group of youth in critical gameplay, ensure that they are learning and thinking about health topics they are exposed to, and making sure my group is working toward creating our own educational health science-based board game. After every board game I play with the youth in my group, we discuss the mechanics and ethics and goals that made the game exciting or competitive, as well as what makes other games excruciatingly boring—as we move toward creating our own games, these discussions are important in pushing them to make an end product of which they are proud.

The game design workshops the youth attend every Tuesday and Thursday also lead them to see games as avenues for critically addressing different ethics and values. For example, in this past Tuesday’s workshop we discussed the ways in which certain board game styles can encourage the use of agency, such as in Clue, or try to make a point about the repetition and constraints of everyday life and inevitably lead to a specific destiny in their end goal, such as in the Game of Life.

Even beyond the scope of the HHA program, these discussions are important as youth pursue their dreams of becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants, graphic designers, and police officers. At Hexacago Health Academy, the interdisciplinary skills and knowledge program participants receive will not only enrich their modes of thought, but also give them the skills needed for their desired professions and disciplines.

The ways-of-seeing-the-world that they encounter during a game design session or during the  post-information session (“information session”) policy or social issue debate that arise spontaneously amongst the youth and their facilitators are developmentally crucial for a group of teenagers looking to enter adult life and make their mark; in my role as a facilitator I have noticed that the skills, resources, professionals, and educational tools they are exposed to during their time HHA are already starting to become a part of shaping how they go about making that mark.

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Learning and Teaching through Games: 
Game-Based Pedagogy at the Hexacago Health Academy (Megan Macklin)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Megan Macklin who is a Design Lab fellow and a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where her research focuses on contemporary young adult fiction.

This summer at the Hexacago Health Academy, youth participants have the opportunity to engage in health education and STEM learning through interactive gameplay and collaborative game design. At the end of three weeks, each team, led by a college-aged Youth Facilitator, will have created a board game based on a serious, health-related topic. These games will reflect numerous interviews with and presentations by health professionals, in-depth research into health topics, and meaningful group discussions about health and well-being.

While their games will encourage their potential players to learn through gameplay, the Hexacago Health Academy participants themselves are experiencing learning gains during the game design process. Through the program’s game-based pedagogical approach, HHA positions its participants as both students and teachers. As students, our youth are gaining expertise in the topic content of their games. Currently, the topics that seem to have the most traction among the young game designers include teen pregnancy, contraception, and STIs, and also childhood obesity. These issues resonate deeply with our participants: they address real-life choices youth face that often are taboo or misunderstood, as well as consequences that can have lasting effects.

Additionally, through gameplay youth can learn about game mechanics and the rhetoric implicit in game procedures and strategies. For example, they can analyze the role of chance in games, a mechanic with direct implications for a project that plays with various forms of contraception and contraceptive efficacy. Throughout this process, we hope that HHA youth will develop an appreciation of the critical merits of games. Although academic fields such as English, art history, media studies and even comparative literature have taken up the study of games, this would be a great stride among youth and youth educators for a medium often criticized for providing at best entertainment and at worst distraction.

As teachers, HHA participants will channel their expertise into game projects that will educate players about a health topic, beginning with their peers. During the game design process, our youth will have a chance to play and provide feedback on other teams’ games. Already in the second week of the program, the HHA youth have developed sophisticated methods for inquiring into games. Although asking whether or not a game is fun still remains a large question when evaluating games, other questions have entered into the conversation that probe deeper issues, such as the influence games can have on real-life decision making, especially when they incentivize or discourage certain strategies. As Dr. Brandon Hill wrote in a previous entry, gameplay allows players to try on different strategies in a relatively risk-free, bounded world. When built around a serious topic like a health-related issue, games can also teach players to pursue safer and healthier strategies; for example, the game Infection City, which is part of the Hexacago suite developed by Game Changer Chicago, promotes a strategy of disease prevention, as opposed to post hoc disease treatment alone. But perhaps more importantly, games can provide a safe space for experimentation and even failure, and the incredibly rich learning opportunities that they elicit. As game designers, HHA participants will be able to send important messages about healthy choices, as well as the factors that might support or confound these practices.

In addition to serving as peer educators, the HHA youth will also have chance to share their work with family and friends during a showcase on Friday, July 24, 2015 from 3:00 to 5:00 pm in the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse (Room 901). As in previous summers, which saw other Game Changer Chicago and Ci3 programs including The Source and Project S.E.E.D., we expect to be blown away by the products of our youth’s collaborative efforts, and most of all by the maturity with which they will explain the serious topics and thoughtful considerations behind their games. Beyond the showcase, the games developed during HHA will be available for purchase on The Game Crafter, and later this year the GCC Design Lab will revisit and further develop these projects with the hope of testing them in schools. The Hexacago Health Academy and its participants will provide the first iteration of an ongoing game development project, one that will continue to allow players and developers alike to both learn and teach through game design and gameplay.

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New Practices for STEM Learning = New Methods for Research (Brandon Hill)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Brandon Hill who is the Executive Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3).

Perhaps one of the most interesting and exciting parts of my job as the executive director and senior researcher at Ci3 and the GCC Lab is designing research projects around our games and game design programs. As a behavioral researcher, research methods for me have mainly derived from spending time researching in experimental psychology and physiology labs and a few summer field research projects focused on bird behavior in southern Indiana. However, in my current role, the organism of study and subject matter of my summer research has changed—adolescents and games.

**The challenge. **Both adolescents as a study population and games as a field and mechanism for interactive behavioral intervention pose several unique challenges. First and foremost, a clear and concise methodology for researching gaming and game design behavior and STEM learning is relatively limited and best practices for examining the effect of game-based education are still being developed as game-based learning begins to gain traction. Although there is growing evidence about the importance and potential influence of game-based learning, the “how to” of researching and evaluating its effects is still not 100% clear—often testing and evaluating using existing methodologies of fields like education, developmental psychology, and cognitive science. Second, adolescents are an ever-changing and developing group—personalities abound, maturity levels vary minute-to-minute, and the overall interest in the research enterprise can easily be influenced by the presence of pizza and candy bars. Nevertheless, most studies on adolescents show that abstract reasoning and memory are fully developed by mid-adolescence and that adolescents as a whole are not that different from adults in many studies of risk and reward. However, anyone who has spent a fair amount of time working with youth will state that, “_young _adults are definitely not adults”.

Research has shown that there are distinct areas of difference in learning for youth and adults. For instance, studies of adolescent judgement and risk demonstrate that youth are more influenced by their urge to try a new experience or follow an impulse, rather than planned reason for their action.  In fact, adolescents’ behaviors do not always correlate well with their behavioral intentions, which is why some youth engage in behaviors they distinctly recognize as dangerous or risky. As a whole the period defined as adolescents affords the developing brain a time where learning, whether through self-experience or peer observation, is critical as the brain’s neurobiology is solidified.

**Game-based learning. **Given the known differences in adolescent behavioral intentions and actual behavior, game-based learning affords youth the opportunity to experience something new without experiencing the same amount of risk as in reality. In other words, when a mistake is made in a game, it occurs in a risk-free setting. Adolescents engaged in game-based learning can learn through practice and play. In game-based learning, mistakes and risks are built into the actual game mechanics. When a player loses, the player learns how to manipulate his/her own behavior to not make the same mistake twice, or at least make an effort not to. Anyone who has played the old-time video-games like Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros™ (1985) will likely learn to withhold their impulse to jump over a manhole until the man-eating plant has appeared and submerged. Even though it may take a few attempts or failures, eventually the player can control the impulse to jump, even with the accelerating music indicating that time is limited. This type of psychophysiological response closely represents what we consider learning and behavioral control. However, understanding how many attempts or how this experience of failure and learning translates to the actual behavior of youth is still to be determined.

New strategies for learning require new strategies for research methodology and practice and as I have learned over several years assessing our game-based programs, no one field or method quite fits game-based learning or fully captures its effect. Thus, our research team uses an interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative approach to understanding how a summer program that uses games and game design, as well as an ample dose of exposure to a diverse range of STEM professionals and mentorship, influences adolescents interests and behavioral intentions to engage in STEM. Quantitative assessments both at the beginning and end of the program examine shifts in attitudes, perceptions, and behavioral intentions, while qualitative in-depth interviews examine process, conceptualization, articulation, and crystallization of thought among youth participants. Ongoing longitudinal follow-up will assess the potential effects and behavioral changes in youth as they enter school and begin to engage with real-life STEM material.

Ultimately, our goal will be to create a risk-free game-based learning environment that will sustain the STEM interests and health knowledge of our young participants.

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On Game Design with Youth: The Hexacago Health Academy Workshop (Peter McDonald)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with University of Chicago English PhD student and game designer Peter McDonald who is also entering his third year as a graduate fellow at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.

Tic-Tac-Toe is one of the easiest games to learn, and one of the first games with formal rules that children learn. It is also a broken game. Specifically, it is easy to map out all the possible moves so that the first player either always wins or at least ties. So playing Tic-Tac-Toe becomes boring once you have mastered the basic strategy. On Tuesday of this week the youth of the Hexacago Health Academy program began experimenting with game design by taking apart the basic elements of Tic-Tac-Toe, putting them back together, and adapting them to something new. It is a process that they will be repeating in the coming weeks at increasingly complex scales, as they learn the basic components that make up games in general (rules, play, physical components), find their individual aesthetic and design sensibility, and use these skills to talk about complex social topics related to sexual and reproductive health.

Each step of these activities was meant to provide a window in miniature on the game design process as a whole, and walking through them alongside the students will, I hope, offer some insight into the learning process. My co-teacher Keith Wilson and I began the workshop with some of what makes a rule, a game mechanic, and a goal. These are the basic building blocks of games, but their simplicity belies the difficulty of grasping them clearly either for design or for thinking critically about media consumption. For instance, game mechanics are the things that a player can do within a game world, which can be summarized as a series of verbs. A game might include running, dribbling, jumping, shooting, dunking, passing, and blocking—a list that might describe more games than basketball but goes a long way to describing the kind of action that makes basketball fun. Within the first two days of the workshop each team had already played seven or eight board games, giving them a repertoire to draw on in addition to their knowledge of sports and video games, and in discussion we drew out some of the differences that separate these styles of play.

Life really came into the classroom, however, when we broke into smaller groups and started to put these ideas to use analyzing Tic-Tac-Toe. We began with a prompt: imagine that you are describing the game to a Martian who not only hasn't played this game but who also doesn't know the social conventions of games generally. After the teams of two had written out their rules, we read them aloud and tried to play the game as it was written down, purposefully mis-interpretting ambiguous wordings whenever we could – particularly when the goals and actions were unclear. Sometimes we would draw the board in a strange way, sometimes we wouldn't wait for each other to take turns. The exercise had several goals: it showed how important and difficult it is to write clear rules, let teachers appear more foolish than the students, show how rules are also a pervasive part of our ordinary social experience, and open up a flexible way of thinking about an ingrained style of play. 

Making explicit the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe led naturally into our second exercise, one drawn from game designer Eric Zimmerman, in which players came up with their own variants of the game. Most players began by expanding the board to a 4x4 grid, producing a game that doesn't suffer from the determinism of the original. But with a vocabulary of game terms in mind, we could push students to design versions that only changed the goal, or added a new mechanic. Several of the designs were surprising and elegant. There was, for instance, reverse Tic-Tac-Toe where the object was to avoid creating a line of three, a version where each player had two chances to erase a symbol from the board, a version where the role of a die determined whether you could play on odd or even squares, and a modification so four players can play at once. We were just beginning to know the players, but each group's games clearly expressed different viewpoints and interests—ranging in complexity, strategy, invocation of chance, and speed. While many of these were unplayable at first, we encouraged teams to exchange games, to begin playtesting them, and to continue tweaking. The exercise repeats on a micro-scale the process of learning from a successful genre of game, adding a novel element that can alter its meaning in minor or radical ways, and testing how the whole system holds together in an iterative fashion.

As this blog post goes to press, Keith and I are about to begin the second game design workshop, where we will expand on these game design skills and use them to examine a topic surrounding sexual and reproductive health[4]. We will be continuing these kind of design exercises until the players are designing and building games of their own from scratch, influenced by but no longer copying other games. In a larger sense, these workshops participate in the broader philosophy of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, which sees practice intimately tied to the knowledge gained through research, and doing as a form of learning that reveals all sorts of unexpected outcomes. By taking part in these workshops the youth move from participants in a program and recipients of knowledge, to equals in a larger process of understanding what kind of effects games can have. I personally can't wait to see what they come up with.

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Increasing Interest in STEM and Health Careers:  High School Students Interaction with Science and Health Professionals at the Hexacago Health Academy (Jess Preleski)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with project coordinator Jess Preleski who works as a Center Specialist at the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3).

STEM and health careers encompass a wide range of career tracks and occupations that are becoming increasingly needed. STEM occupations, for example engineering, have been described as the “jobs of tomorrow,” but are we adequately exposing our younger generations to these careers in science and health? Some high schools discuss traditional science and health careers, but it is non-traditional fields, such as climate science, public health, renewable energy and software development, which are advancing rapidly. Although I believe school systems and communities are working hard to offer more opportunities in science and health, there are many gaps and disparities in STEM participation. 

A critical part of our 3 week summer program is exposing students with a glimpse of these future opportunities. Throughout the course of the 3 weeks, students will interact with approximately 15 different science and health professionals who work at the University of Chicago. These interactions will be held in small groups in order to increase group discussion and encourage students to ask questions about different health and science topics, education and careers. The first day of HHA kicked off with Dr. Michael Rossi, a historian of medicine and health in the Department of History at The University of Chicago. He began his lecture on public health messaging and sexually transmitted infections. He opened discussion on stigma and victim-blaming around syphilis, and how public health messages were read from decade to decade. Students were able to ask questions about why gender played a role in syphilis and AIDS public health campaigns, which produced a lively group discussion about risk, responsibility, individual behavior, prevention, and choice. 

The remainder of Week 1 of HHA will establish discussions on unplanned pregnancy, Latino health disparities, cancer research, and pediatric mobile health. Week 2 highlights HIV and Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEp research, pediatric brain injuries, male roles in reproductive health and biophysics. Week 3 features discussions about gender and sexuality, sexual violence, fertility and population, health policy and abortion and contraception access. We have recruited staff and faculty from a range of different fields and occupations to increase interest in a wide range of STEM and health related careers. A special thanks to all our featured speakers who are participating in HHA this summer; Michael Rossi , PhD, Arshiya Baig , MD, Melissa, Gilliam, MD, Pamela Beauduy, A.P.N, Sydeaka Watson, PhD, Iman Little MPH, Natalie Yapo, MD, Brian Nguyen, MD, Adam Hammond, PhD, Kristen Schilt, PhD, Karen Leal, RN & Linda Twomey, RN, Lilja Stefansson, MD, Lucy Hebert, PhD and Lee Hasselbacher, JD.

In addition to interacting and science and health professionals, students will receive a campus walking tour at the University of Chicago as well, as an informational session on ways to academically prepare for college admission processes.  The university campus tour will provide a small and personalized exposure to a university campus, curriculum and admission requirements, as well as reinforce the college readiness our STEM and health professionals are also providing. STEM shapes our everyday experiences, and we believe providing opportunities for growth in STEM and health fields will not only empower our students, but also shift the way young people think in the terms of health, education and community development.

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Hexacago Health Academy: Introduction to a Game-Based Learning Program (Patrick Jagoda)

Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” begins with lab co-founder Patrick Jagoda who is assistant professor of English and affiliate of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on new media and games, including videogames and analog games. Since 2011, Jagoda and Melissa Gilliam have been working together on a series of digital stories, games, and emerging new media projects that explore social and emotional health issues, social justice, and civic responsibility with youth in Chicago, especially on the South Side of the city. This work gave rise to the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.

African American and Latino youth in the United States face myriad disadvantages in academic opportunities, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. Additionally, these youth suffer from reproductive health disparities that place them at disproportionate risk regarding sexual risk taking and teen pregnancy. It remains common to respond to such inequalities and public health problems by focusing on risks as a starting point for changing adolescent behaviors. An emerging, interdisciplinary body of research, however, shows that youth risk behaviors might better be addressed through strategies focused on strengthening youth assets — skills, competencies, relationships, and educational opportunities that help youth overcome social challenges, achieve academic success, and acquire positive health outcomes.

This summer, the Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab begins a five-year project that seeks to use innovative game-based learning methods to tackle STEM education and health learning among youth. This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Science Education Partnership Award. As we design a series of health-oriented curricula and board games, we will rely on principles of Human-Centered Design, an iterative design approach that brings the end user into the design process early on to ensure that the intervention reflects the needs and resources of the community. The serious games that we produce will also reflect Next Generation Science Standards.

This longer project begins with a summer program called the “Hexacago Health Academy.” For 3 weeks — from July 6-24, 2015 — the GCC Lab is hosting approximately 20 youth, ages 14-18, on the University of Chicago campus for a science and health intervention that takes the form of a game-based curriculum. This workshop invites high school students to learn about key sexual and reproductive health issues through a combination of game play, game design, health research, and interactions with STEM and health professionals and adult mentors. The goal of this program is to research and evaluate our game-based curriculum with an eye toward increasing the scale in the future. The workshop will also yield a series of health-oriented board game prototypes, co-created with participating youth and adult game designers, which can eventually be played by youth around the United States.

The core of this curriculum focuses on Hexacago: a game board that the GCC Design Lab created in 2013. This board represents a map of the city of Chicago with an overlay of hexagons. Over the last two years, we have created several game prototypes that focus on health and STEM issues and can all be played on this single board. Each game depends on a socio-ecological model that grapples with health promotion at individual, interpersonal, community and policy levels. This summer program exposes youth to public health and science careers while fostering game development using the Hexacago board.

So what, exactly, will participating youth learn this summer? Our curriculum, which integrates gameplay, game design, and sexual and reproductive health research, focuses on a few key capacities:

Developing game design skills and an understanding of serious games

Gaining exposure to health professions and gaining an increased awareness of health topics (including pregnancy, Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention, contraception, sexual and reproductive health policies, and sexual assault)

Networking with health professionals, game designers, university graduate and undergraduate students, and potential mentors

Learning to be proactive in recruiting mentor support for academic and professional goals

Collaborating with diverse teammates from different schools and from varying grades for a shared goal (designing a serious game)

Developing an understanding of the critical dimensions of gameplay and game design

Applying lessons learned in game design and health research to everyday life situations

The Hexacago Health Academy draws equally from the arts, humanities, medical science, and education. A project of such transdisciplinary scope would not be possible without a wide-ranging team that includes core staff for the larger five-year project along with the facilitators for this summer’s workshop. Melissa Gilliam and I are Co-Principal Investigators and Brandon Hill is serving as Co-Investigator. This summer, the workshop is being coordinated by supported by Jessica Preleski and the GCC lab director Ashlyn Sparrow. Core research and data collection about the workshop process is being led by Luciana Hebert and Erin Jaworski. Key game design instructors include three graduate students from the humanities: Megan Macklin, Peter McDonald, and Keith Wilson. The daily workshop facilitators include a group of University of Chicago undergraduates, including Maha Ahmed, Addie Barron, Anna Cohn, and Adan Meza. Finally, faculty and professionals from the University of Chicago and our community will visit the program, including doctors, nurses, scientific researchers, lawyers, epidemiologists, and sociologists who work on health issues.

The Hexacago Health Academy program was made possible by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science Education Partnership Award, as well as key support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society, and Hive Chicago. The program is taking place in conjunction with the Chicago City of Learning (CCOL). To follow the Hexacago Health Academy over the next three weeks, return to this blog Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for new entries coming from a diverse range of faculty members, game designers, youth mentors, and researchers. You can also follow information about the program and receive regular updates on the GCC Design Lab on Facebook and Twitter.

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GCC Seeks Actor for 2/7 Video Shoot - PAID

Ci3 and Game Changer Chicago Design Lab are seeking a Latino actor to pose as a main character in their new digital game, Bystander. 

The actor should be between 14 and 22 years of age (playing a 17-year-old high school student). He will be compensated $15/hr for 2-3 hours, receive mention in the game credits, a still professional photograph of their game character [expected delivery: April 2015], and two single-ride Ventra cards for travel.

The shoot will be held on the University of Chicago on Saturday, February 7th. If interested, please send a photo and contact information to Erin Jaworski at [email protected] or 773-834-9965 for more information.

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THIS SATURDAY! Youth ages 14-22 welcome. Submit photograph to [email protected].

Learn more about Bystander here: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/gamechanger/portfolios/bystander/

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Game Changer Chicago is seeking high school students ages 14-18 to appear as characters in the digital game Bystander. A photo shoot will take place January 24 on the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. To reserve a one-hour slot, please send your name, age, school and a photo to Erin Jaworski at [email protected].

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GCC Announces "Bystander" and "Smoke Stacks"

Game Changer Chicago Design Lab is proud to announce two work-in-progress games for youth.

Bystander is an interactive, computer-based narrative that seeks to empower youth to end sexual violence. The second game, Smoke Stacks is a board game designed to educate youth on the dangers of smoking and the role of tobacco companies in promoting use and addiction.

For more about our past, present and ongoing projects visit game changer.uchicago.edu or follow us on Twitter.

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Hexacago - Educational Game Design - Hive Chicago

GCC Lab Director Ashlyn Sparrow blogs for partner Hive Chicago about the design and developments of the Hexacago game board and the new anti-tobacco game Smoke Stacks.

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GCC Parent Org Seeks Actors for PAID Video Shoot - Nov. 24 & 25

GCC's parent organization Ci3 seeks male and female actresses (ages 18-22, preferably African American) for a paid video shoot at The University of Chicago.

We are developing a mobile app that provides women with increased information about various contraceptive methods and STI prevention, to be used in a clinical setting. The app will feature short video testimonials, focusing on condom use.

You will need to memorize and recite on camera a short, 1-minute script about condom use. Actors must be relatable and natural: it should seem like the experiences in the script are your own.

Time commitment is 1 hour (includes memorization and filming) and compensation is $20. All shoots will take place on November 24 and 25 on The University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park.

If interested, please contact Philip Ehrenberg at [email protected] or Dr. Lucy Hebert at [email protected] or [phone].

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GCC Featured in Fast Company Magazine!

Game Changer Chicago was profiled in the business media magazine Fast Company.

The Alternate-Reality Games That Teach Kids the Cause and Effect of Their Circumstances

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GCC Seeking Chicago-Area High School Students for Youth Fellowship!

Ci3's Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab at the University of Chicago is a space for exploring games and important questions about health and communities. GCC designs games and other technology-based projects with and for youth. 

We are reaching out to Chicago area high school students to find Design Lab Youth Fellows. Youth Fellows will be part of a design team, along with Chicago area undergraduate and graduate students, University of Chicago staff and professors who will collaborate to design projects using stories, art, games and technology.  We are looking for youth who work well in teams and are interested in art, design, research, public health, technology, games and more!  Youth fellows will be expected to commit an average of 4 hours per week, with an option for summer employment, and will receive a stipend for their participation. Each fellow is asked to make a commitment to the Lab starting October 13th. The fellowship will end June 13th.

If you are interested in becoming a GCC Design Lab Youth Fellow, please fill out the application by October 3rd. Late applications will not be considered.  Questions? Contact Lab Director Ashlyn Sparrow at [email protected].