The Educational Games Workshop continues at the High School “Ernesto Ascione” of Palermo within the project Riselab – Network for Inclusion, Development and Empowerment..
The ten meetings, with the students, all have the same structure divided into different phases:
1. Learning, with the theoretical explanation of what they are going to do;
2. Team building, with recreational activities such as icebreakers, aimed to consolidate the various groups of participants,
3. Entertainment, during which the kids try existing board games.
The first two meetings of the workshop focused mainly on learning the basic mechanics of a board game. The students learned the basics of building a game, and with them they tried to put the ideas together, dividing into 5 groups, to build 5 differend games:
- Group n°1: board game on the board (like Monopoly and similar) environment-themed;
- Group n°2: themed card game about ecology and recycling
- Group n°3: board game “Guess who” style on the subject of legality and anti-mafia;
- Group n°4: board game on citizenship theme about the Traffic Laws;
- Group n°5: board game on billboard environment-themed about animals.
In the third and fourth meeting, the students focused on the development of the game, in particular on the definition of the basic mechanics and on the objectives to be achieved in order to win. They used stationery materials such colored cards, papers, pencils, pens and markers to build prototypes of their games.
From the fourth meeting, however, the students began the testing phase. After making the first version of their games, they started testing them by playing with each other, trying all the games and giving each other feedbacks, highlighting what could be the strengths and weaknesses of each game.
In the next meetings, in the coming weeks, the new games created will be fine-tuned, adding other mechanics to make them more engaging and fun.
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