Learning by Playing - Larp As a Teaching Method - Nordiclarp.org. (2015). Retrieved from https://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/04/learning-by-playing-larp-as-a-teaching-method/
Quotes to support LARP as a methodology
Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.
Confucius
The chief art is to make everything that children have to do, sport and play too.
John Locke:
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
The future of teaching
The next generation of teachers will be expected to possess a broad spectrum of competencies and skills.
They are faced with a seemingly impossible task: today, classroom instruction should teach not only content but also competence.
It should be as interdisciplinary as possible and it should take the heterogeneity of students into account.
In addition to hard skills, classroom instruction should also teach soft skills.
It should encourage and include the use of the learning material in a variety of situations that students will face in the real world.
At the same time it should also be problem-oriented, varied and interesting, and sustainable.
Motivate students to learn
Schools have demonstrated that this challenge can be met and mastered
Games (EduLARP) in education
Usually fun
Players often forget that they are actually doing something benefitial.
Those who have fun learn more easily
More motivated
More likely to tackle larger challenges without reticence
Lifts players out of their complex and often trivial or boring everyday existences for a brief time
Delivers them into a new world that is often exciting, epic and comprehensible in ways that the real world is not.
Provides a sanction-free experimental zone, a safe framework in which we can try out new ways of thinking or beha ving, reasoning or feeling — without fear of negative consequences
Adopt a role in the sense that we act “as if” something were “real” even though we know that it is not.
Often less likely to be discouraged by setbacks; indeed, after “failing” they often return to the challenge with even more motivation than before
Learning by doing
An action-oriented method
Students truly become active in the lesson or subject matter by trying it out themselves, through their own actions.
Participants learn with all their senses.
When they viscerally experience the content, when they physically exert themselves, when they smell the appropriate smells and see the appropriate visuals, their entire bodies act as sounding boards both for the experience itself and for their reflections on what they have experienced and learned
It is possible to present topics that are typically dry or theoretical in ways that make them accessible to sensible experience or allow them to be expressed in symbolic ways
What might have been abstract content is instead placed in a concrete, practical context and takes on tangible relevance.
Students learn not only with their heads but with their guts, with their emotions, senses, and intellects.
Simultaneously addressing the cognitive and the emotional faculties that the learning content becomes truly relevant and emotionally meaningful to the learner.
Learn more easily
Greater retention
Live, dynamic and in color
Theoretical advantages of EduLARP as a methodology
Gamification vs Edularp
Implement playful learning in real classroom situations
Be able to employ individual elements of gameplay in their teaching in whatever measure they might find effective and appropriate.
Use the whole Edularp method as well as smaller elements of games and gameplay.
Participants in learning games and normally aware of the fact that they are playing a game and thus entering into a kind of alternative reality, this is not the case with gamification.
Gamification simply attaches elements of games or uses game design techniques to modify everyday processes and procedures.
The user remains fully and completely in the real world.
Gamified process is not a game.
The goal of gamification is to make everyday processes more interesting, motivating and seemingly more rewarding.
Learning in Games
Theoretical and practical introduction
Development of the students’ own Edularp
Didactic potential of Edularps
The design: Game Organisation Document (GOD)
What makes a good story?
What elements a good game requires?
How a good learning quest should look.
Specify and explain all the key criteria for the game.
Constraints
Project Planning
Learning content
Story telling
External Setup
Game Design
Documents, materials, props, resources
includes all the requirements that the game absolutely must fulfil and that have already been specified or must be specified before the start of development.
May include conditions specified by third parties as well as requirements set by the developers themselves.
The number as well as type(s) of participants (age, degree of fitness, etc.)
The resources that are available (e.g. budget or team strength)
The planned development time.
The composition of the team
The division of labor
The schedule
The communication pipelines
Plans for documentation and data management
Learning content that is to be conveyed by the game (concretely defined)
Type of learning context (soft skills, hard skills, competencies, experience etc) is specified
School curriculuar links
All the elements that deal with the game’s story.
Formulate the plot
Plot development and progress are delineated on a timeline.
Define the setting, genre and topic of the game
Specify the staging and dramatugical elements
Determining all the elements of the game that are not immediate components of the actual game.
All the elements that take place before the beginning or after the end of the actual game
Pre-workshops
Warm-ups
Debriefings
Transfer of learning content
Evaluation of the game
Evaluation of pervasive elements
Describe and visualize the construction of the game
Degree of linearity.
Define the victory conditions
Determine whether the game can be won cooperatively or competitively
Define possible game rules - regulative and constitutive
Rules of irrelevance?
Formulate the call to action
Intended player motivation
Define points of interest
Determine if players take on roles during the game, and who writes them
Define the game world
The developers explicitly define all the quests that occur, describe their construction, learning goal(s), style, necessary additional knowledge etc.
What items are required for the game - before, during and after, as well as those required for dealing with players.