Luca Morini

EscapED: Adapting Live-Action, Interactive Games to Support Higher Education Teaching and Learning Practices

Game-based learning (GBL) is often found to be technically driven and more often than not, serious games for instance, are conceptualised and designed solely for digital platforms and state of the art technologies. To encourage a greater discussion on the potential benefits and challenges of a more holistic approach to developing GBL, that promote human centred interactions and play for learning, the authors present the Game Changers initiative. The Game Changers initiative is discussed and focus is drawn to one of its programmes titled; escapED, for developing non-digital GBL approaches within the context of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics combined with Arts (STEAM) education. EscapED, aids the design and creation of educational Escape Rooms and Interactive Gaming Experiences for staff and students in further/higher education settings. The authors present the escapED theoretical framework as a tool to aid future design and development of on-site interactive experiences, in order to provide engaging alternatives for learning and soft skills development amongst higher education staff and students.

We Are the Game Changers: An Open Gaming Literacy Programme.

This paper discusses the first iteration of Game Changers Programme hosted by Coventry Universitys Disruptive Media Learning Lab DMLL, an open game design initiative. The Programme had the goal of facilitating new models of teaching and learning, new practices in cross-faculty learning/collaboration to make game design and development more culturally open and accessible to staff, students and the broader informal communities surrounding the University. The paper will discuss the theoretical foundation of the GameChangers Programme, grounded in a conceptualisation of design as a holistic, modular and creative process, and in an ethos of sharing, collaborating and remixing. The paper will present the outline of the Course and the Community that constituted the core elements of the Programme, and discuss a plural showcase of a variety of outcomes from the GameChangers Community, focusing on the Programmes cultural impact and on how the Programme as a whole disrupted established notions of game based pedagogy, and the customary hierarchical relations between producers and users of learning games.