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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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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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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.