Refining Learning Experience Framework
Today’s meeting for our group was very productive were we were able to address creating more “knowledge clusters” within our game experience, pacing of the game, and visualizing our how learning models intertwine with the game experience journey that we had laid out before.
These were our progress that was more separated and still felt disconnected to each other.
We started to look at the past learning models that we had done and chose the CCAF and Structured Flow of Goals (SFOG) model to mainly focus on because we thought that these could best reflect our ideas and already followed our workshop/game expereince.
We took the CCAF model and color coded it, then integrated it with our SFOG model using the step by step workshop steps we outlined before.
The colored stickies begin at the top going from right to left, and are the steps of our workshop/game. The arrows and descriptions on the side are components we included in our long term and short term goals for our SFOG. We highlighted with 3 images the 3 key designing thinking models that we wanted our learners to take away by the end of the workshop: the futures model, CLA, and double diamond theories.
We decided to frame our experience like this because we realized in our first attempted to do this (seen on the left), there were many more cycles than one Context, Challenge, Activity and Reflection in or workshop outline.
From this, we were able to more clearly organize and frame our thoughts into what we want to accomplish with our learning experience. It allowed us to also go back and emphasize parts that we were missing. For example, when we were integrating the CCAF model with colored stickies, we saw that some areas of activity or reflection was more obscure in the steps that we had outlined and so this helped us mend these holes in the experience. This also allowed us to better pace our learning experience by incorporating context, challenge, activity and reflection in a more equal manner throughout the experience rather than having challenge, challenge, and challenge to overwhelm the learner from this complex topic.
Looking at our progress, we decided that having a digital workshop/game would be helpful in what we want to accomplish because of the more complex visuals we can provide for our users as well as build a more intricate storyline with the aid of a digital guide. Otherwise, players/learners may find it very difficult to navigate with multiple cards they have to choose, answer, then organize together to progress forward. However, there are benefits of using physical game-board or mediums because it allows for more intimate conversation and interaction which is very crucial to our activities as well (especially in the areas where each “stakeholder” must discuss the criteria for what the artifact they will design later should fulfill, and the brainstorming process when they build the artifact together). Therefore, we may want to use both an app to guide the game and a physical board/medium to play on.
Having a digital aid in the game also could help our learners as well because of how impactful visuals can change perception. After reading the chapter 4 in Things that Make Us Smart by Norman, he describes how physical artifacts can provide so much more information because of our knowledge of our reality already — we know the affordances of physical objects from experience.
Our next steps would be to choose a couple areas/moments in the game we want to expand on and developed well. This includes creating visual/physical representations of the physical platform we want to design as well as the digital “guide” component. One area we are currently thinking of expanding is the section where we teach our learners about the CLA. We decided this because it’s one of the more complex sections of the game, and also how it embodies a variety of systems thinking topics such as stakeholders, analysis of current and future states, and more.
