Using Games to Teach Design

This past week, I led a summer camp at Monmouth County Parks that introduced the basic concepts of theatre design to students in grades 6-8. This is most definitely not my comfort zone as my design background is largely self-taught and I do not need to run any tech at school. However, I think there's something to the idea that one doesn't fully understand something until they can teach it and leading these camps has definitely taught me a lot.

Building from the experience last year, I incorporated a few changes into the program that worked well. The main change was moving away from a diorama-style build to one that would allow for a larger scale. The workshop encourages students to think more about scale and function that artistic skills, but working in the confines of a shoe box limited how things could work. This year, we used foam to create a base and backdrop on which the set would then be built. This allowed for a generous 1 inch: 1 foot scale and resulting set models that are easier to manipulate because they are bigger. Students who had chosen to build sets based in natural settings cut corners to not have to build such large trees and mountains. This produced great teachable moments when their "scale actors" suddenly dwarfed the trees! Theatre seems easy from the audience's perspective viewing the finished product - there's a LOT of work that goes into the planning and execution of what ends up on stage. You can see the students' models in the pictures included on this post.

I also picked up a valuable lesson that I will incorporate into my design unit at the middle school. I could tell that the campers were going to finish early on the last day and asked my wife, who is also a drama teacher (Instagram / TpT) for ideas of what I could do with them in the meantime. She suggested bringing in the board game Clue to play and to maybe incorporate into a final lesson on design. In the morning, I (re)introduced the game to the campers and instructed them to design one of the rooms from the game. I handed each of them cards from the Who, What, Where decks and encouraged them to build the room as they imaged it, but to incorporate elements (or clues) about the weapon and suspect into the drawing. They did this with subtle hints like color (for the suspect name), or a cutting board (for the knife), and in other ways. We played a modified game of Clue using those drawings, which didn't quite go as planned. Then we played the board game after. I think if I were to switch the order of those things, there might be an interesting and fun lesson about designing a location on stage. We'll see.

As fun as this camp was, I am glad that the summer camp sessions are over. As of this writing, there are 15 days until my first (PD) day at school. My wife and I are trying to use this week to do a number of family things with the kids before we need to really get serious about planning, prep, shopping, etc for whatever this school year has in store for us all!

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Rolling for Classroom Engagement

Last year, I returned to the high school classroom after a 15 year hiatus. The schedule was part-time and solely focused on a series of Acting classes. This year, my schedule includes sophomore English and a co-taught humanities-centered class in the school's Leadership Academy. I've enjoyed the new challenges in this work, particularly inspiring students to engage and share in the English classroom. (Theatre students aren't hesitant to share; in fact, it is possible they may share too often!)

As a shy, introverted student myself, I am sensitive to the hesitation and discomfort that teenagers may have about being called upon to answer questions, or (gasp!) read out loud. One solution I've found is in randomizing the way in which students are selected for these tasks.

The first step is always to ask for volunteers, but that typically brings crickets to the room. Another teacher had suggested writing student names on popsicle sticks and drawing those from a jar. Instead, the process in my classroom has been further randomized by a series of cards and a pair of foam dice (that I stole from my children).

 

Foam Dice from Dollar Tree

At the beginning of class, I pass around a set of 24 cards that are numbered from 2-12. Each number is written twice. When it comes time for a question, or to read aloud, I roll the dice and the students holding the resulting number must decide if they want to volunteer to read/answer, or battle it out in a best-of-3 bout of rock/paper/scissors. The card is collected from whomever ends up reading/answering and the next time the number is up, the other person holding it has no choice but to respond. I've been doing this for about two months and it has worked very well. The students are excited by the anticipation of the dice roll and love the rock/paper/scissors battle. What's best is that not one person has refused to read/answer in this format. Thanks to the folks in the weekly #games4ed Twitter chat for sparking my interest in "gamifying" the classroom!

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