“Making up games comes so naturally to children and youngsters, but as adults we tend to loose this playful and fun approach to life. On 10th of January youth workers and youth leaders from eight countries gathered in the small Georgian town of Rustavi to relearn the excitement of playing games.
This Erasmus+ training course “Games 4 Learning“ was organized by Shokkin Group Norge and Youth Association Droni and included participants from eight countries – Georgia, Norway, Belarus, Armenia, Ukraine, Spain, Denmark and Armenia. With seven days this project gave us means and motivation to model different social problems in educational games.
Before making our own games we played a few first. A game called “Ticket to holiday“ left me an astounding impression of how powerful a game can be made. Even though just being a game, it had a strong effect on people. Everyone was so immersed in the game that they started to play out their given stereotypical class levels even though no-one said we had to. I was the low-class or “mewi“ as called in the game. Treatment of different class levels was unequal. Some of us tried cheating, some made agreements with upper class levels, but overall the inequality remained and formed our attitudes and behaviors independent of out real life backgrounds. I tried to live up to my real-life values, treat everyone fairly and give my best to help, but I still kept loosing. I was pissed! So I threw all my niceness out of the window and started a revolution. Just a game, but it was a magnificent simulation of real-life social problems facing our world every day, influencing our attitudes and behaviors.
We realized how a game can teach us about complex social topics by giving us quite realistic experiences. Our goal was to learn to create games that model cause-effect connections and maybe also give players opportunity to come up with solutions. Thus this day of playing was followed with well-lead discussions about those social issues and an introduction to different game elements.
After that it was time to make our own games. And oh my!, this was no fun and games at all. Having a background of natural sciences, I know very well that a good model of an issue is short and simple. How a physicist calculates the volume of a cow? Assumes it is a sphere in a vacuum. This is not something you can do with social topics. Any hidden insignificant factors can switch the whole scene to the opposite direction!
Creating the game was very tiring. Our topic was about media. At first in only a day we made a good sophisticated game mechanics and overall to-do list for writing and cutting necessary cards, which for me took a lot of intermediation and mind power. Our group consisted of bright creative talkative people, who naturally had a lot ideas, but we needed only one.
The next day my whole team wanted to make an easy game instead. I really liked our first game, but planning it had tired me quite a lot, so I opted for the new idea. Unfortunately our second day’s teamwork was mostly us arguing over details. There were a lot of misunderstandings. My intermediating jar ran out of energy. From this I learned how sometimes it is better to be decisive and take the lead rather than trying to make everyone happy short-term. Even walking in a wrong direction is sometimes better than no walking at all. Otherwise I myself will get lost and loose my sense of direction.
Overall I am happy that I took part of that training course. Our instructors were great and knowledgeable, all the participants were warmhearted and awesome companions, whole program was well put together. But what I loved the most is how during this week a part of my mind turned from a passive learner to actively teaching myself. This was non-formal learning in action. I started to reflect on all the experiences I gained there and was able to tie together very different subjects, like physics and social sciences. I even learned some of my most valuable leadership lessons during this week, for which I am very grateful.”
Liis Kuusik
“Games4Learning was an amazing learning experience for me, as it gave me the tools of constructing games as well as direct opportunity to practically implement them! During the training course, in a team of 30 international youth workers we experienced the strong potential of games as learning tools, how to apply them in a way to guide participants through the experiential learning process.
For me the most valuable point was actually to work in a team and creating a game together in a group of 4. Even though, group work is something very common and usual to the most of us, still here it was a special experience for me – first of all, creating a game is something none of us has done before, secondly we wanted to make it meaningful for the participants, and finally to make the game fun and at the same time valuable – the dynamics within the group of creators of the game should have been well. Therefore, my focus during 2 working days was exactly on these aspects, and based on the result I actually could see how much I grew while practicing own attitude, approach, communication, participation manners in my working group.
I appreciate a lot the opportunity to be part of this experience and gain the knowledge, ideas, inspiration to include games in the process of learning. I believe that in each of us there is a living a child and by combining in a game fun aspect and consciousness of the participants we can make our inner children be happy and wise!”
Jekaterina Lukina