{"id":243,"date":"2013-06-24T23:45:15","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T04:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/?p=243"},"modified":"2013-09-26T14:41:57","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:41:57","slug":"reimagining-education-games-for-civic-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/2013\/06\/24\/reimagining-education-games-for-civic-engagement\/","title":{"rendered":"Reimagining Education: Games for Civic Engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At last month\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/reimaginingeducation.org\/\">Reimagining Education<\/a> event convened by the U.S. Department of Education and the MacArthur Foundation, I led a breakout group that brainstormed a game to encourage civic engagement. We set the following boundaries to direct our thinking:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It had to target young adolescents (middle school aged)<\/li>\n<li>It had to be scalable<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>\u2026 therefore it had to be both accessible and \u201csafe\u201d for teachers in typical school settings, e.g. who may not be well-versed in activism and need to avoid being \u201cpolitical\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>It had to be easily piloted for minimum cost<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With these criteria, we quickly coalesced around a range of possibilities, all of which featured the following properties:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hyper-local and location-based<\/li>\n<li>Built around mobile technology<\/li>\n<li>Lighthearted, preferably fun<\/li>\n<li>Aiming to demonstrate relevancy and provide immediate efficacy<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Out of this, three concepts bubbled up:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_125643_565.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_125643_565-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"Reimagining Education - Civic Games\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-245\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_125643_565-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_125643_565-1024x768.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<strong>Prompted<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Two of our ideas had kids documenting the world around them using mobile devices. Inspired by the experiments of Ben Stokes at USC and by the now-mothballed website \u201cThis is Broken,\u201d we imagined youth armed with their camera phones taking pictures of things that respond to various prompts, e.g. \u201cThis is broken,\u201d or \u201cThis could be better,\u201d or \u201cThis is great!\u201d The end result would be a civic map of a place from a youth perspective.<\/p>\n<p>The Prompted app would then ping anyone who walked by a location where a picture had been logged. It might prompt a question \u2013 \u201cWhat would you do?\u201d followed by a yes-or-no voting mechanism on possible actions, or a lightweight discussion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Common Ground<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Another take on youth-created civic map was for participants to be able to look through photos taken by peers and begin to, in some fun or gamified way, tag and organize them. The focus would be on helping youth discover ideas or views they have in common as well as seeing other points of view.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Infrastructure<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The third concept was a \u201cCivic Mine\u201d that operated more as a set of tools that might, in addition to the ideas already described, also include story builders. What particularly caught our group\u2019s imagination from this concept was being able to \u201cflash forward\u201d into some possible future where a particular problem was solved, or \u201cflash back\u201d into history when a similar problem was previously addressed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Next Steps<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The technology for developing a minimum viable product (MVP) for Prompted and especially Issue Sorter is already in the pockets of most kids today \u2013 mobile phones equipped with cameras, plus off-the-shelf systems like Flickr. In fact, an MVP has already been piloted and proven by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamesforchange.org\">Games for Change<\/a> founder <a href=\"http:\/\/annenberg.usc.edu\/Faculty\/Doctoral%20Students\/Stokes%20Benjamin.aspx\">Ben Stokes<\/a> during the course of his work at USC. Adding a geo-prompt or a sorting function would be a fairly simple task.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, none of the technology presented here is all that challenging. The trick \u2013 as with most educational interventions \u2013 is to figure out how to get teachers in real schools to use it as part of an ordinary class experience.<br \/>\n<div id=\"attachment_246\" style=\"width: 778px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_141641_353.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-246\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_141641_353-768x1024.jpg\" alt=\"Reimagining Education : Civic Games\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" class=\"size-large wp-image-246\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_141641_353-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/files\/2013\/06\/IMG_20130529_141641_353-225x300.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-246\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Graphic notes from our workshop session.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At last month\u2019s Reimagining Education event convened by the U.S. Department of Education and the MacArthur Foundation, I led a breakout group that brainstormed a game to encourage civic engagement. We set the following boundaries to direct our thinking: It &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/2013\/06\/24\/reimagining-education-games-for-civic-engagement\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113393,923,53641],"tags":[3176,113397],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archival","category-blog","category-educational-games","tag-civic-engagement","tag-off-topic-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":400,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}