Institute of Play's blog

On November 13, the Institute of Play observed a Multimedia Storytelling class at the Calhoun School, taught by Ayesha Randolph, a master teacher who participated in our 2008 Summer Teacher’s Institute. When we visited, her class was engrossed in Find the Idea, the first quest in the Writers of the Digital Roundtable mission, developed in collaboration with the Institute of Play. Find an Idea, is a series of short “story-generator” quests and mini-games to help students brainstorm and develop treatments for their stories.

In this clip, students pitch story ideas to literary agent/teacher Ayesha and work on storyboards to illustrate their ideas. In order to complete this stage of the mission, students must successfully summarize their stories and demonstrate a commitment to the completion of their work. After students have successfully pitched their ideas, they commit to a submission deadline, and multimedia format, and then seal the deal with the signing of a writer’s contract.

This past summer, the Institute of Play conducted its month-long Summer Teacher Institute with a small group of 6th and 7th grade New York City teachers. During the course of the workshop, the teachers collaborated with IoP's game designers and curriculum specialists on work with the game-based pedagogy that is at the heart of the proposed school, Quest to Learn. The teams developed a set of core curricula, games, and toolkits that are being piloted in the teachers' classrooms this Fall.

This video captures a recent session with Ayesha Randolph's 7th grade Creative Writing students at the Calhoun School. As part of the 21st Century Writers mission, developed in conjunction with the Institute of Play, Ayesha's students play the game 'Once Upon a Time' as well as create their own story cards to brainstorm ideas, story structure and understand the elemental components of a story (i.e. plot, setting, character, and conflict).

The Institute of Play and Arizona State University’s K-12 Embodied Media and Learning group have been developing a suite of game-based learning models in SMALLab (Situated Multimeda Art Learning Lab), a mixed reality learning environment developed by ASU’s David Birchfield.

In this video, David Birchfield is playtesting the Titration* scenario at Consortia Night, Parsons Design and Technology program, October 16 2008.

* Titrate (Chemistry): to ascertain the quantity of a given constituent by adding a liquid reagent of known strength and measuring the volume necessary to convert the constituent to another form.

PLAYFORCE is the Institute of Play's internship and playtesting program, in which young people play, test, and design games. In this video, our loyal and hard-working intern Lamar Gibbs, reflects on his experiences as a member of PLAYFORCE and his aspirations for the future. Information about the Spring 09 PLAYFORCE session will be available soon, so check back for more information about joining the PLAYFORCE!