I tried out a new exercise last semester and wanted to provide a quick write-up. I used a loose ‘scavenger hunt’ framework to encourage Thesis students to go out and expand their creative horizons. It worked pretty well! Certainly better than I expected(/feared), so thought I ought to document it a bit.
Background
A medical student knows that he must study anatomy in order to become a doctor, so he has a reason for study. A future scholar has a reason, because he knows more or less what he wants to know. But there is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment because he has no concrete reason for not yielding to its demands and, for all he knows now, surrendering to his immediate desire may turn out later to have been the best thing he could have done.
W. H. Auden, “Making, Knowing and Judging”, The Dyer’s Hand (1962)
I’ve been teaching a senior Thesis class now for a number of years now, in the Parsons BFA Design & Technology program. Teaching students at this level is real a privilege, because there’s nothing left to teach them. The point of the class is for them to work on something of their own choosing, to demonstrate what they’ve learned (or simply, that they’ve learned). That appeals to me very much.
But over time one thing I’ve noticed is the somewhat parochial interests of many students. Not even just in terms of their games references (although it is that), but even just in general. I think that’s a shame in and of itself. But also, the best student work I’ve seen each year, without exception, has involved the designer drawing on something else in their work. There’s a koan-like paradox here; the key to making games is not making games.
Part of the Thesis process involves them doing creative research, and we spend a lot of time looking at referents and precedents for their work. But they have to do those things, so it becomes work to be completed as efficiently as possible. And there’s more to getting inspired than playing games related to your topic. Sometimes you need to do things with no obvious immediate relevance!
I’ve also noticed students tend to get too bunkered down doing their class work, and they don’t spend enough time doing… well, literally anything else. I think that is a mistake for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that being an effective creative professional means cultivating diverse interests and inspirations. Also, productivity drops quickly without regular cognitive breaks, but students (like most of us) will keep grinding away even if they’re not getting much done, when what they really need to do most is go hit the bricks.
At some point last spring, towards the end of the thesis process, one of my students was getting up to leave and said, with a thousand yard stare, that they just needed to go home and “lock in”. Instinctively I immediately replied, “I don’t want anyone to ‘lock in’. I want you to be free.” (Which is an example of a cool little trick I’ve learned that renders you immune to feeling cringe: Meaning It).
So anyway, I wanted to see if there was some way to help students expand their horizons. But, without making them do it. As always, my first thought was that I might use a game in order to do that. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I went with the workman-like but timeless structure of the good ol’ scavenger hunt.
Summary of the Basic Idea
I’ll go in the details below, but just so you have the basic idea:
Everyone in the class got a checklist like this:
The students were encouraged to go do any or all of these activities outside of class. To score a point, they needed to report back and share with the class about what they did, which is when I marked it off. All of this was entirely ungraded and optional.
And… it went great!
Students went out and did lots of interesting activities they wouldn’t have done otherwise, mostly just for the joy of doing so (and also for the admiration of their peers).
I don’t think this is revolutionary or anything, but I was surprised it worked as well as it did. Below is further detail on what I did and how you might do it as well.
Preproduction
First, I came up with 15 “Challenges” to populate the list.
- That felt like roughly the right number, since it’s the number of weeks in a semester, so it’s an activity a week on average, which feels doable. My feeling is around 15-20 is the right range for this.
- Almost all of the tasks, everything after the first three, involve going out and doing something. They cannot be completed from your bedroom. This is made not immediately obvious by the fact that the first three can.
- I came up with the groupings (“around school”, “around town”) post-hoc just to break it up a little visually. I don’t think they’re important, but I don’t mind delineating school vs. the city categories.
- I tried to cover a variety of creative media and modalities, and word things as broadly as possible while still remaining specific to a general class of activity (ie, “live music”, which could cover anything from a huge concert to a local choir), both to let students engage in a variety of interests equally, and to allow for some creativity in fulfilling them.
- Exposure to other forms of art is implicit in most of them. Where activities are games-specific, they’re off the beaten path (eg. a local arcade, something retro).
- Some of the individual challenges worked better or worse than others. I got the timing wrong for some of them, like it turned out that the school’s Maker Center doesn’t offer orientations after a certain point in the semester, locking a bunch of students out of that one (whoops). Or, I noticed that no one had a particularly interesting culinary adventure, I suppose because college students relationship to food is more extractive than meditative, and dining out is expensive.
Then, I printed out the checklists on cardstock (at quarter-size, four to a page).
- The physicality is important. Everything students do these days is digital, so I wanted to distinguish it from that. It also differentiated this activity from all other class work.
- Being physical has some drawbacks. Like, a couple people lost their cards at one point or another, but it wasn’t a big deal. I printed extras, and I kept track of the points myself (in a spreadsheet, naturally) which I go into later on.
That’s it for prep! Once I had my list and printed them out, they were ready to go.
Introducing It to the Class
On the second or third class (so once we’d all gotten acquainted a bit), I gave everyone a card. I explained the high-level goal of this, of encouraging them to broaden their horizons and help find inspiration for their thesis work. Then I went over how it would work:
- They were to do any and all of the listed challenges, and then report back to the class about it.
- When they did, I’d mark that they’d done so and they’d get a point.
- At the end of the semester, whoever had done the most would be declared the winner.
- I mentioned there would be a prize, and it’d be commensurate with the magnitude of the victory.
- I think it’s important the prize not be explicit, and possibly bullshit (which was certainly everyone’s assumption). You don’t want anyone doing this for the prize, but it’s maybe important there at least be one.
- I also left it vague so I could decide later on what it’d be, ranging from something I’d do anyway but dressing it up as a prize (like being snacks on the last day), to an actual prize (I wanted to give myself an out in case it was something embarrassing like the winner did one thing when everyone else did zero.)
- Being game designers, the students immediately perceived a problem with the scoring, in that it’d have a high likelihood of a tie. I didn’t think that’d really matter, but I proposed a scoring method that made tasks worth more points if fewer people had done them. I never explained the exact methodology, I just said that challenges fewer people had completed would be worth more. I implemented that as: each challenge was worth 21 points, minus the number of people who’ve done it. That probably needs work, but it also doesn’t really matter, the focus here isn’t on the points.
- I explained it was ungraded. There was no “point” to doing this from a class grade perspective.
- This meant a handful of students immediately disregarded the whole assignment and never participated (see below), and I think that’s fine!
- I think it being ungraded is a load-bearing part of its effectiveness.
- I emphasized the real reason for doing it, that being just my honest conviction that it would help their process overall.
- My greatest fear is students’ indifference, as always. After explaining all this, a student’s hand shot up, and she said something like, “This is just a trick to get us to be a normal person!”. I was a little crestfallen at this. But having it be ungraded was an important bit of extending trust. Maybe I am doing that, it was like I was saying, but I won’t make you if you don’t want to.
- Because she’s right of course, it is a little bit of a trick. If it wasn’t, I could just say, “Hey you should go sit in a park and read a book sometime” and trust they’d do it. But I think it’s something much more like a magic trick than a deception- knowing it’s a trick doesn’t remove the magic, in the same way that knowing a game doesn’t matter doesn’t remove the desire to win it.
- By the way, in the end, that very student was the ultimate winner, the only person to do all fifteen tasks! Even though they had instantly seen the pedagogical intent of the exercise. That’s great! You’re never going to get one over on students, they’ll see through it all anyway, so it’s better to just be transparent.
Through the Semester
So that was the intro, and then we devoted some time to the activity at the beginning of each class throughout the semester. At the start of most classes, I’d ask if anyone had anything to report in. They had to stand and tell us what they did, and I’d record the points.
Again, the students being game designers themselves, they gleefully tried to rules-lawyer certain things. These ranged from trying to get free points for having done something on the list but before the semester started (nope, doesn’t count), or trying to make a case of something counting to meet certain criteria, like arguing that playing rock-paper-scissors counted as playing a game from before 1995 (nope, but that’s okay too, it just let me explicate that even though rock-paper-scissors (or really, sansukumi-ken) seems utterly timeless, something cavemen would’ve played, instead it surprisingly seems to only be a few hundred years old. No points for just playing it though). For the most part, the rules-lawyering was mostly in good fun, and diminished as people realized it’d be a hollow victory anyway. And when people did something in good faith, even if it didn’t exactly meet criteria, I tended to count it.
The “report backs”, having students explain what they did, were excellent. Some were so good I couldn’t have scripted them better if I had tried. A student went to a local games event, and gushed about meeting a designer whose work they had played before in class. Another student reported back about having a research meeting with a school librarian in the most glowing terms, talking about how the librarian had ordered a book just for them on their particular topic. Students excitedly sharing the genuinely good and interesting experiences they had was the best outcome I could have hoped for!
It also created some implicit good-natured competition, encouraging everyone to do something interesting for a given task. Someone who reported back about reading the second or third volume of a manga they were already reading, well, they were made to seem a bit unadventurous by the person who went and read Moore’s Utopia. It also acted as a check on trying to cut corners or do something boring to complete a task, because even if I’d count it, it’d be embarrassing to relate.
Ending The Exercise
I wrapped up the contest in the last class, after final presentations (I’m increasingly convinced that final presentations shouldn’t actually happen on the last day of class, it’s really helpful to have a final debrief day!).
As I said, I was planning on the prize being something nominal. But I felt people had done so much it’d be nice to surprise them with a real prize. So, I gifted them each a (digital) game, cost/quality scaled to their placing. That sounds a bit extravagant, but I have a huge backlog of game keys from various bundles and so on I’ve accumulated over the years, so I give them away to students when I can work them into some exercise or another. So, everyone got a little game, with better ones going to higher scorers, and the games were at least relatively related to their thesis as well. But this part doesn’t really matter, it could’ve been doughnuts or something, with a special one for the top winner. Students didn’t know that’s what they’d be getting, so it was just a fun bonus.
Results, Takeaways & Problems to Solve
In the end, students collectively did 87 activities, an average of about 6 each (excluding the four students who didn’t participate). You can see exactly what that breakdown looks like here:
Some observations about this:
- 4 of the 18 students didn’t participate. But actually, one of those was doing activities and going along to group ones the whole time, they just didn’t feel the need to ‘score’ them. That’s perfect! 3 people not being interested in this is totally fine, and it’s important it not be forced.
- No surprises that the ‘school activity’ ones were less often achieved, they were probably the hardest to schedule.
- It seems surprising the “non-art museum” one was so rare, but it’s a problem of definition (a lot of museums are art museums), and one of awareness (students only being aware of the Museum of Natural History, and not knowing about, say, the excellent but lesser known New York Transit Museum)
- As successful as this was, it is a bit sad how hard it is to get anyone to read a book. But still.
- The point system didn’t matter, but you can see the tie-breaking in action with the difference between students B and C. Both did 12 activities, but the ones B did were slightly rarer (like visiting a non-art museum).
When we debriefed about this as a class, a student said that as a result of this they had gone out almost every weekend this semester, which they don’t normally do. I found that pretty moving.
Problems & Ideas for Next Time
As a first playtest, I think this went pretty well. But there’s lots of room for improvement here. The activities themselves can definitely be improved, but there’s some bigger structural issues too.
Having students share with the class was vital, but it also took up a lot of time. And worse, it took up an unknown amount of time. Sometimes no one had anything to turn in, sometimes four or five people did. So the activity could take anywhere between 0 to upwards of 30 minutes per class. That’s a bit annoying from a scheduling perspective, because the rest of itinerary needs be flexible enough to accommodate.
The competitive element was good, in the “esteem of my peers” sense, but the competition design needs work. A few students took to this immediately and started doing things- that should have spread enthusiasm around. Instead, I could tell some students sort of gave up because it was clear they wouldn’t be able to catch up with the students who started on it early. This is a classic multiplayer scoring conundrum. It feels like there needs to be some sort of rubberbanding, or a scoring system that isn’t just a single pile of points.
Instead of one big list, I have aspirations of doing a version where the tasks are on a card, and maybe students only get one or two at a time, and they need to complete a card to get a new one, like more of a refreshable quest system? Or maybe a 1000 Blank White Cards inspired version, where the students make their own challenges for eachother? I’m not sure.
For the Fun of It
Ultimately, the whole exercise was yet another example that affirms my belief in the intrinsic motivation we all share. You can’t force anyone to go out and have fun. But you can create a context to celebrate it.
So it might not be in this exact form, but I’ll definitely be doing this again next year! If you do a version yourself, let me know how it goes.
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