The atomization and bureaucratization of educational goals is upon us.
Table of Contents
Enumeration of SLOs
For those purposes, I consider the learning outcomes of this work to be:
- Produce creative solutions to complex situations by creating a game to be played by others
- Combine knowledge and epistemologies from game studies with those from the disciplines relevant to your topic
- Proficiency in working with others
- Proficiency in finding, adopting, and creating habits of work using new technologies
- Become familiar with some of the culture, history and applications of games
How will these SLOs be addressed in the course?
The major project, creating a game around a topic, something to translate an idea or perspective into game form, encapsulates all the SLOs. Students will need to understand the disciplines relevant to their topic, as well as what they will draw on from the world of games. The project is creative, original work. It will be done in small teams where the students will need to divide up their work among many skill areas and content areas. To make games, they will need to use new technologies like ARIS or RPG Maker, game engines, as well as many other digital tools for content creation, team communication, and so on.
In addition to the project itself, each team will need to produce a proposal and post-mortem paper describing their research, ideas, and progress, where the above concerns and others will be spelled out, and a public-facing short description of their game.
Along the way, there are several smaller assignments that point to the SLOs. We will draw shared readings from several areas of game studies. Class discussions, written responses, and similar assignments will ask them to absorb and analyze information from game design and criticism, and also to relate it to their own topics. They will be asked to produce background research relevant to their topics, analyzed in terms of the perspectives presented there, as well as investigate other approaches to education about those topics, including other game-based approaches.
There is also an assignment to give a public talk about an important game (or topic from game studies such as Gamergate). Instead of seeing these as presentations for our class, these are organized as “Brown bags” for Honors and beyond, a way for outsiders to get a small glimpse at the world of games. While this gives students a chance to prepare for an oral presentation (technically not an SLO) we will also view it as another way to research and analyze our material, and to help each other succeed.
Upstream Assessment
For Honors courses, there is an assessment and rubric that each instructor must assign, grade, and share with the Assessment director. This becomes part of an overall program to assess the ability of Honors to teach its Program Learning Outcomes. For the 400 level, the outcomes and skills assessed relate to analytical essay writing. This is a bit awkward for this course; I created it so that writing a paper of the usual sort would not be the main thing we did or cared about. Oh well.
So we compromise. I am indebted to my higher ups to secure a piece of analytical writing from you (an essay). It does not have to play a large role in what we do, only I don’t want it to be throwaway or to put too much more on our pile. While most of the work we will do is team-based, this assignment will be individual. You will write an argumentative essay describing the work you’d like to see a game to do, or why a game is/isn’t the right tool, in our topic area. To support your arguments, you will have our resources about game design and its uses, as well as those defining our topic and its issues. The other area to draw on will be other works in any medium that have sought to inform or make change in these areas.
The essays will not be just for a grade but will inform our design process. If you can come up with solid perspectives on what games might be able to do, what the pitfalls are, and really use the papers to understand our topic, then they will be valuable for us all to read. Depending on the topic chosen, we may be able to use papers from an earlier course as a first step to writing these essays.
