Lessons from Game Design: How should students "play" your syllabus?

May 12, 2020
looking down at a table with game design books and documents and game pieces

In our latest installment from the Learning Lab’s gameLab team, Graduate Fellow Clarisse Wells introduces two gaming concepts, Metagaming and Speedrunning, where players draw on their accumulated experience in order to optimize game mechanics and exploit trends in gameplay to create advantages and complete new challenges. While this might sound like “cheating,” in these posts Clarisse explains why metagaming and speedrunning might actually be things you want your students to do, revealing how metagaming is connected to metacognition, or the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. Just as metagamers understand the systems of their games so well that they can develop new gameplay, we want our students to not only learn the material but to understand how they have learned, so that they can pursue creative approaches to their own future learning. Inspired by these strategies, Clarisse provides example assignments designed to help students develop metacognitive skills.

Clarisse WellsClarisse is a PhD Candidate in South Asian Studies with a passion for the digital humanities. She is currently collaborating on several educational game projects designed to teach students history through the exploration of virtual worlds. As a Learning Lab Graduate Fellow, Clarisse focuses on 3D modeling and game design, especially the game engine Unity. She has supported courses in several disciplines through Unity office hours and online tutorials, and is a leader of our gameLab team.

If you missed our first gameLab feature, you can view the first installment of Lessons from Game Design here.

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