Aalborg workshop

I had a lovely (though brief) visit to Aalborg to deliver a workshop for FLIP'D today (not in the lovely looking building in the image, but in the very impressive NordKraft). I'm glad I managed a couple of hours wandering around too - I love an "explore" of somewhere new to me :)

I talked a little about play, games, library teaching, permission to play, and we carried out a few activities too - thank you to everyone for taking part! I used more slides, with more text, than normal mainly so I could upload them somewhere for reference - they are now on Slideshare (plus the organisers will share them with attendees directly).

I mentioned the Journal of Play in Adulthood at the start, as someone asked me about it, I'll share a link to that! It's an Open Access peer-reviewed journal (no charges to read or publish in), I'd love anyone using play with adults to consider publishing their work in it :) https://www.journalofplayinadulthood.org.uk/  My article on "Permission to Play" in this journal goes into much more detail around the issues we used the "chatterbox" (flip / flop?) to discuss. 

I also mentioned the fantasic Counterplay Conference / Festival organised by Mathias Poulsen - hopefully he's now organising these every 2 years at Dokk1 in Aarhus. I tend to feel that the short video I tried to share at the end sums it up nicely - the giant cardboard rabbit that hops up to the clown (watch the vid!) is responsible for the most surreal experience I've ever had at a conference. A room full of people sat watching a cardboard rabbit hop to the front to deliver a plenary session and everyone accepted it as a perfectly normal thing to happen :)

Apparantly some of the links in my book for librarians using play are broken, I'll try and check through it over the next few days and add links below if I can find and fix any. The one that was specifically mentioned to me was SEEK! (A simple card game for search skills) - that should be on my institutional repository to download / adapt / print for free.


(Note - I might edit this later to add a few more links.)

Cardiff Lego Workshop

I ran a Lego workshop in Cardiff the other day - a full day of looking at how we could use ideas from Lego Serious Play (or related ideas) in library teaching.

It was a lovely group of nearly 20 people, though I think I worked them a tad hard... lots of people were flagging towards the end. A full day has worked well in the past, but might be tempted to do a half day in future for a workshop like this (it would also make tickets cheaper!) next time I run it.

Lots of lovely tweets during the day under the #libraryplay hashtag, such as the one below - take a look if you want a flavour of the day!

... My final build is me overcoming my unwillingness to share the silly things I do in teaching, by becoming more transparent. Thanks to @playbrarian I am hopeful I will have a good reception. #libraryplay pic.twitter.com/TJt8nQKNsY

— Sarah Nicholas (@SarahNicholas) February 16, 2018

Using games to teach Maths to Biologists

At the end of last week, I ran a workshop in Sheffield (in the Diamond building at Sheffield Uni). This one was for a group of people who all taught maths to HE students in the biosciences.

Most of them seemed to be having similar problems, dealing with students who could massively vary in terms of maths knowledge and ability, some of whom don't want to be doing maths at all.

Hopefully, some of the games will help them address these issues... and more importantly, the process should help them create more polished games for the students in future!

Moulton College, Making Educational Escape Rooms

I had the pleasure of running an Educational Escape Rooms workshop in the East Midlands last week at the lovely Moulton College. I do have a soft spot for land based colleges and enjoyed having a pootle around the grounds at lunchtime!

Anyway, we had a productive day, splitting into groups to create prototype escape room activities. To get a flavour of what was produced, we recorded all the final prototypes:


Anyone else fancy something similar running, just give me a shout!

Huddersfield Escape Room Workshop

I ran another Educational Escape Room workshop in Huddersfield last week, at the lovely Heritage Quay! It was a full day of following a set process to create some prototype educational escape room ideas - videos of the prototypes are here to watch.

Amy has blogged about the workshop properly (rather than this quick reflection & video link from me!).

Thank you to everyone who took part and worked hard throughout the day :-)

I collected some feedback at the end of the day, and I was particularly interested in whether I should let attendees play some examples, or whether that would influence them too much (so they'd copy and get less out of it!). The general feeling seemed to be that they'd appreciate examples to play, perhaps later in the session (so it didn't influence too much!), so I'll have to think about how I can tweak future workshops accordingly.

Lots of open workshops!

I've got lots of (open) workshops coming up! All subject to having enough people book on them, but we have:

Teaching Tips for Librarians, Friday afternoon, 10th March, Sheffield.
https://shefftips.eventbrite.co.uk
This covers some of the basic teaching mechanics and is aimed at librarians. We look at: Learning Objectives; Lesson Plans; Assessment; Evaluation and some related issues. We'll give practical help, tips, interventions, and templates to use in your own teaching sessions, with particular emphasis on "one-shot" teaching sessions and active learning interventions. It will run as a highly interactive workshop.

Making Educational Escape Rooms, All day Thursday, 13th April, Huddersfield.
https://hudescape.eventbrite.co.uk
A full day workshop making educational escape room style activities, aimed at anyone interested in using escape room ideas for teaching.
The day will be hands on, with a process scaffolded to enable attendees to work in groups to create a prototype of an escape room style activity. By the end of the day, all attendees (in their groups) will have sketched out an escape room style activity and started to create the puzzles that make up that activity.

Creative Teaching Double Bill, All day or half day Friday, 5th May, Manchester.
https://mancdouble.eventbrite.co.uk
Both these workshops are aimed at anyone interested in creative and playful approaches to teaching, particularly in FE and HE sectors. 
In the morning will be:
Picture This! Using the ‘Writing Essays by Pictures’ approach to teaching academic practice
Writing Essays by Pictures is a workbook for students who need help with researching and writing their first evidence based research essay for university. It explains academic practice that often remains hidden to students through everyday analogies and offers activities that allow students to explore the research and writing process in the step-by-step way of painting by numbers.
All attendees will receive a copy of 'Writing Essays by Pictures' (list price £15).

In the afternoon we have:
Making (non-digital) educational games
In this afternoon workshop, we will follow a carefully scaffolded process to prototype educational games. Working in small groups, you will create a prototype game and share it with your fellow participants in just 3 hours.This process can then be followed after the event to quickly and easily create educational games and playful learning experiences for your learners in future.

Finland workshop

I've a few workshops booked in over the coming months, plus more are in the planning stages. One I'm particularly excited about is in Helsinki at the main University Library! It's been arranged through the STKS (Finnish Research Library Association).
I'll be running a workshop around creating escape room materials for libraries - using the workbook I've created as a template / scaffold for the day.
I won't have much of a chance to have a nosey around, but still excited about spending 24 hours in Finland!

The day after I'm going to Tallinn, Estonia (a short-ish ferry ride away), finishing off setting stuff up to run all the training, etc., that I do through an Estonian company as an e-resident, which I'm hoping will be much easier admin wise than in the UK.

Making Escape Rooms for educational purposes

So this little thing arrived today! A workbook I've created to scaffold the process of creating educational escape room games... the idea being it takes you through a process, with sections in the book to fill in and slowly create an escape room type experience, but for educational purposes.
I might make it available for other people to buy in a little while, but for now I want to try it in a workshop or two with me facilitating it.
Currently wondering if I organised a workshop for the Easter vacation, whether that would suit people... and whether to organise it close to home (Huddersfield, Leeds, Manchester type area) or further afield. Any preferences, comments, suggestions, offers of venues, let me know!

LILAC 2017 workshop

Just had my workshop proposal for LILAC 2017 accepted, abstract follows! I'm particularly pleased to have sneaked in a keyword of "Argond" in, which I think is doog yrev.

In this workshop, participants will:
1) Learn some key benefits of using playful approaches to library instruction, including the use of puzzles and escape room techniques.
2) They will reflect on how playful learning, particularly the use of escape room ideas, could apply to their own teaching practice.

Real life escape rooms, exit games, locked room games, whatever we choose to call them, have exploded in popularity in recent years. From the television programmes of my youth (Crystal Maze, The Adventure Game), through increasingly complex computer games, adventure games have now manifested into "real world" rooms that can be found in cities all over the world. The "real life" escape rooms involve working together as a team to solve a series of puzzles, normally culminating in escaping from a locked room. There is often a strong narrative involved as part of the activity, increasing the sense of a "magic circle", where participants can step outside the normal world into a playful place, where different rules apply.

They require teamwork, observation, creativity and critical thinking from the participants. The playful, yet challenging atmosphere created by these games encourage participants to try repeatedly to solve the puzzles. This can be taken advantage of in the learning environment, allowing learners to practice engaging critically with information sources, to practice skills as diverse as referencing and constructing a search strategy, and to generally increase their information literacy in a "safe" environment.

Participants in the workshop will:

1) Hear briefly about the theoretical benefits of creating playful learning environments and be challenged to think about how this might apply to their own teaching practice (10 minutes).
2) Try an example of an escape room style puzzle, as a practical example of how escape rooms might work in practice (20 minutes).
3) Be introduced to a method of approaching the design of escape room activities for their own workplace (15 minutes).
4) Participants will then be encouraged to consider how they may apply ideas from this workshop to their own workplace (10 minutes).
5) We will finish with a few minutes for additional questions and round up (5 minutes).
Further reading will also be recommended to broaden the theoretical knowledge of interested participants.

Anyone considering attending this workshop should expect active participation, play, puzzles, padlocks, prizes, and possibly pass the parcel. But probably not penguins. Or quite as much alliteration.

Prior to coming to this session, try to solve the puzzle in this final paragraph. Learn to accept this will happen throughout the workshop. Always remember that this thing can be valuable in learning. Yet you won’t see it unless you look at the start of things.

Library "make camp" in Manchester

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A residential camp to make escape room stuff!

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SLA weekend course

SLA weekend workshop 2016 logo

I'm currently putting my box of goodies together for the School Library Association. They run a weekend course every year for members and I'm doing a couple of (very) short workshops this Saturday on making games for information literacy. We have about 45 minutes for each of the workshops, which is really pushing it for time, but I'll give them a structure to follow to make games and we'll see how much people can create in a very limited time!
I've done this sort of taster workshop a couple of times now in just an hour, but it will be a real challenge to do it in even less... hopefully some people will fancy coming to a longer / fuller workshop with me at some point in the future, so this will wet their appetites. If nothing else, I'll try to make it fun :-)
I suspect it will also be too rushed to take videos of prototypes like I normally do!

ARLG Lego workshop in Cambridge

On Monday 6th June, I'll be running a Lego workshop in Cambridge. I think I had a flying visit to Cambridge once before and spent a few hours there about 30 years ago... and not been back since! So slightly disappointed I won't be able to find time to explore properly.

That said, I'm there to run a Lego workshop, which is a fun thing to do in it's own right... so looking forward to Monday, and if I remember to take some photos and videos I'll post them on this blog afterwards.

I'm doing the workshop for ARLG Eastern, so expecting plenty of HE and FE people there, and hopefully a mix that includes a few non-librarians too, fingers crossed :)

More Lego workshops

I ran a Lego for Library Teaching workshop a little while ago in Manchester which seemed to go down well!
As a result I've just got back from Dorchester where I ran a similar Lego for Teaching workshop for a small group involved with the Peer Assisted Learning scheme at Bournemouth University.
So would anyone else like to attend a Lego workshop by me?
I've got one coming up for ARLG Eastern in Cambridge (full details on their page) on 6th June 2016. This workshop offers a reduced rate to CILIP members (£75 + VAT) or can be booked at the full price by non-members (£100 +VAT).
I can also run similar, or custom workshops if anyone wants to invite me to do so (charges will apply!) - please get in touch with me via twitter or my website and we'll work something out.

Lego for library teaching...

Not quite a games workshop... but last week I ran a Lego for Library Teaching workshop in Manchester.

We had a full day of exploring the use of Lego (and to a certain extent, other building materials) in libraries / learning support. It's the first time I've spent a full day running a workshop on this, only touching briefly on it in other workshops before, and I really enjoyed it - I think the attendees did too.

The video above is a summing up of the workshop by an attendee (Lawrie), there are more available to give a flavour of what we did, as well as some pictures I took on the day... one of which is below!

Alicja has already written a short blog post of the day too.

A photo posted by Andrew Walsh (@andywalsh999) on Jan 30, 2016 at 4:14am PST

Danish workshop at Dokk1!

Just back from running a workshop at Dokk1 in Aarhus, Denmark as part of the Next Library festival. I ran a workshop called "Make a library game in 90 minutes" where we squashed as much of a normal half day workshop as we could into 1.5hours!
It meant it was a tad rushed, but still good fun and everyone managed to create a rough prototype. I'd love the chance to run some proper workshops in the Nordic region, perhaps I'll have to start looking out for the chance to do so...

Dublin 1st May!

Looking forward to going to Dublin soon (1st May) for a day to run the making games for libraries workshop. Bookings are currently open, but close in about a week's time.

Hoping we'll get a few more bookings before the day, as I've been keen to go outside of England with these workshops for a while - I feel guilty just running the "open" sessions in Leeds / Manchester or London!

The last one was in Glasgow, this is in Dublin, so all I need to assuage my guilt now is to run one in Wales... next one perhaps?

Palm Trees and Coconuts

A prototype game from the SALCTG gamification #libraryplay workshop in Glasgow, March 2015.

Find IT!

A prototype game from the SALCTG gamification #libraryplay workshop in Glasgow, March 2015.

Database Ace

A prototype game from the SALCTG gamification #libraryplay workshop in Glasgow, March 2015.