My Level 5 students are hosting a board game expo – to demo the games they’ve spent to year designing. Everyone’s invited. April 24th – 11-2pm – Henrion Gallery – Staffordshire University
Let’s hope it’s a success, the games are looking amazing so far and I’m so proud of the students work so far.
There’s a nice write up of the event here on the Department Blog
This was a nice day – and a nice change of pace from what I usually talk about – because I was talking about a specific module and more importantly the fun I’ve had getting 2nd year students to make boardgames. I happen to be in the middle of teaching this Gameplay Applications as module as the requestfor this came in so I knew exactly what to talk about. 
There might be video at some point but the gist of it was the highs and lows of the module so far and a discussion on what they students have designed so far, and the other outcomes that have come out the module. What was super lovely the wave of people coming to talk to me afterwards about what we were doing and how revolutionary (?!?) it was to have university modules where they design board games. (I’m sure that’s not true – but it’s a fascinating thread of research if it is)
So a massive thanks to the V&A and the Museum of Childhood for having me talk – and in such good company too. There was also an amazing Board Games Jam run by Playtest UK! Which meant I got to take in all the fun of a games jam without having to actually run one. (although we do have one planned for Welcome Week)
I use Facebook a lot in my teaching, mainly for group communications – and we now have large scale global groups for a lot of the awards. It came to me today the the polls function, which I’ve used for lots of other things was an easy way to do a quick check list that the students could see if they’d done all the bits of an assignment – especially with big multi part assignments.
What’s quite nice is I had immediate feedback from some of the Level 6 students that they found it really helpful in working out what they had left to do for the final year projects.
