Last week I took a camping trip to Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks, where (among other things) I ran a Puzzle-based interpretive program at the Grant Grove Visitor Center. We had about a dozen people total, half of whom stayed around for 40 minutes (twice the scheduled program length) to better work on their Puzzle projects!  Below are some pictures from that program.

 

Some happenings from the past four weeks:

This year, for the first time in a long time, Mindful Mammoth did not participate in the Santa Monica Mountains Science Fest. A sad deal. The 2013 SAMO Science Fest was a sort of coming-out for us, so the Science Fest always felt like a special event. It’s also been a consistently rewarding event, where we have been able to provide information and inspiration to hundreds kids, and also to do some useful networking with adults from other outreach organizations.

This year, the Science Fest was scheduled for May. However, this May, I was teaching two wholly new classes – classes which I had designed over the previous two months, but which still needed quite a bit of on-the-spot tweaking: Rocket Science – a middle school class on Newtonian physics and model rocket construction; and Critical Game Studies – a class on media, messaging, and game design at the Los Angeles Film School. In combination, those two things were more than a full-time job, and there just wasn’t time left to organize and staff a Science Fest dealeo. Sad. Very sad. Hopefully we’ll return there next year.

Once those two classes were sorted out, I took the time to write up Fire Tag, an ecological experiment/game that I created for the 2012 Science Fest, back when I worked for the NPS. I’ve already shared that process, but what I haven’t shared is that  I then submitted the game to IndieCade 2016. One of the great things about IndieCade is that they welcome games of all sorts – digital games, board games, card games, and playground games. Being a playground game, Fire Tag is totally within the scope of the festival. With a little luck, we’ll get a nod again, and have the opportunity to share Fire Tag with this year’s festival attendees. Keep your fingers crossed!

While all those things were going on, I was also plugging away at my quota of entries for the 2016 Serious Play Awards (a part of the 2016 Serious Play Conference). The entries were a very divided bunch. Some were playful but shallow, just games with a pinch of educational value. Others were deep but unfun, powerfully interesting simulations but with little imagination or whimsy. Very few entries were in that sweet spot of being both deep and fun. It was a little disappointing, but also intriguing.

Everything we know about game design, education, and learning says that learning happens most and best when people are 1) emotionally engaged, and when they are 2) as directly as possible practicing the things to be learned. Most of the SPC games did one or the other, providing either engaging play or opportunities to apply skills, but not both. For sure, it’s terribly hard to do both those things well at the same time, but we (the serious games community) know that this is the thing to do. What can we do to make that happen more often? To get more educators and designers to aim for the big prize instead of settling for the same-ole strategy, the strategy that has made ‘educational game’ into a phrase that evokes rolling eyes and disappointed sighs.

Well, we can have more things like the Serious Play Conference, like IndieCade, and like GLS. We can have people like me out in the world, beating the drum, sharing games/information/inspiration. Perhaps there are other things we can do too. It’s worth thinking on.

 

A couple weeks ago, we brought The Puzzle of Life to two elementary school classrooms at Toluca Lake Elementary.

The Puzzle was a big hit with the 5th grade class of Dennis Hagen-Smith. After a brief intro, the kids worked together to solve the puzzle. You can see one group at work in the photo to the right. Once they got the hang of things, we gave them some blank pieces so that they could make their own pieces for the Puzzle.

Last week, we received a set of wondrously excited and encouraging thank-you’s from both the teacher and the class. Among other things, Dennis said that our visit was, “one of the finest educational presentations I’ve seen in my 25 years of teaching.” That’s a huge complement, coming as it does from a highly capable and inspiring teacher. We’ve posted some excerpts from the letters on the new Puzzle of Life testimonial page, here.

With funding being a constant challenge, it’s easy to get discouraged, but the times spent working with curious and excited kids (and adults) makes it all worthwhile.

According to the National Park Service, around 2500 people attended this year’s Science Fest, and several hundred visited our tables to try out the Puzzle. You can see a few of those people in the photos here:

FYI – There was a sign near the event entrance warning visitors that cameras were around, and that they might be photographed. I thought the wording was rather vague, so I was careful to get consent before taking any photographs.

Overall, it was a good day – a bit cool and misty, but that was a big improvement over previous years, which were mostly very hot. We had all sorts of people at the event – tall and short, old and young, thoughtful, hyper, and so on. Most seemed to enjoy the Puzzle, though they did so in many different ways. Some people focused on finding solutions, some drew various sorts of natural objects, and some just drew what they wanted to draw – just because. I see that as a big win, as I very much wanted the Puzzle to be a flexible thing, something that players could use to make whatever they wanted to make.

I’m grateful to the friends and family who helped to transport chairs, tables, and other stuffs, and who stayed around to help staff the Mindful Mammoth booth. I feel a bit embarrassed that I didn’t organize a group photo of the bunch of us. That lack makes it a bit hard to give proper thanks. My only defense is that it was a busy day, and I just couldn’t quite keep track of it all.

I was particularly happy to see several friends from One Spark Academy. They offered encouraging words, looked happy to be outdoors and exploring, and I was happy to see them being happy.

I was also happy to meet several folks from from nearby environmental and outreach groups. We traded email addresses, and over the next few weeks, we’ll keep in touch, and see about working together to expand the scope of the Puzzle and to bring it to more SoCal classrooms and events.