Games in the classroom

The game was "Dumb charades" or at least that's what I grew up knowing it as since you weren't allowed to speak. Just act out your clues.

This was in the Creative Concepting class for juniors in the Advertising major program (BFA)

Objective:

1. Team building
2. Awareness of different cognition and learning styles amongst possible teammates
3. Definition of leadership qualities
4. Definition of boundary pushers
5. Figuring out the pop culture knowledge of the class. And hence the age/generation of the students
6. Agile thinking capability of various students.

Process: The class was "Creative Concepting". The premise of the class was exposing students to various (mostly visual) means of arriving at a concept for a given problem. The tactics across the course include storyboards, image only, text only, combinational campaign. The class also taught methods for research, content gathering, editing and filtering. It touched briefly on demographic study as well. Good habits need to be formed early on in the program.

The students were given the rules on how to play. Movies they could select. There needed to be a consensus of staying with national or international movies. The outspoken ones spoke and were heard. Teams were split with a random note picking exercise.

They forgot their inhibitions and began discussion, agreeing and disagreeing on movies they would give their opponents. They figured out the weak links in the opposite teams and changed movies based on who would act out next. They were frustrated when their team members were unaware of certain movies which according to them were cult movies. Their enthusiastically shared this and more knowledge. Some of the students picked movies that were very difficult to act out. Some students who were fantastic in their production of work were completely stumped at the “impromptu take it by the horns attitude” that the game requires you to have. If someone doesn’t get your clues, switching to quite an opposite technique to make it work doesn’t come very easily to all. And yet, these are all things that they needed to be fluid in to make the most of the creative concepting class.

This proved to be a successful game in many ways. The class functioned much more positively from then on. Presentations were a lot more interactive. Constructive criticism was very constructive. Who knew that playing a game in class would lead to gold!