I am so thrilled to announce that my latest client for Barry Joseph Consulting is the amazing Games for Change. Why am I thrilled, why did I literally get chocked up when we finalized the deal? I’ll explain that in a moment. But first:
TL;DR: I am looking for innovative museum educators to sign up for Game Plan. Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and General Motors, Game Plan is a new professional development program, designed for our current era of social distancing, to raise museum capacity for using games and game-like learning within youth programming. Along with a modest stipend, Game Plan will provide curriculum, online training, a supportive community, and the opportunity for museum youth to compete in a nation-wide game design challenge themed on the idea of resiliency. Game Plan will launch in January 2021. To learn more, please fill out this interest form: https://lnkd.in/gT2itfd or just ask away here!
THE WHOLE MEGILLAH In the months after 9.11, when I worked at Global Kids in NYC. While some students felt comfortable staying at school for an after school program, others were nervous about traveling around the city to a destination to participate. Even in the summer of 2002, some students struggled to get to the location I’d secured at SVA to run our first Playing For Keeps Program.
Playing For Keeps (which is still offered today in schools around NYC) was one of the first youth programs in which youth designed games around social topics, designed to be played by others. Within a few years we attracted funding from Microsoft, AMD, and others, pairing students in low-resourced schools with professional game developers to launch games on the web and in Second Life about access to health care and education in an impoverished rural nation, about the history of medical racism in the U.S. penal system, about how to prepare for natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina (the last was a side-scroller).
Almost no one was making games like that at the time, let alone with youth as co-designers.
To spread practices like this around the country, in 2004 I worked with a few other amazing people to found Games for Change. The community that emerged helped transform popular understanding of the role games could play beyond entertainment: in health care, in professional training, as art, for education, and more. (This year their first all digital festival was attended by 7,000 people from across 51 countries; this week they announced the date for their 18th festival, July 12-14 2021.)
E-Line Media launched the National STEM Game Design Challenge in September of 2010 at the White House with President Obama. The Challenge would spread game design around the country. Over the years others joined to run it, such as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and later Games for Change launched their own game design program which would eventually take it to its current form.
You following so far? In summary, I started working with youth to develop game design literacies which led to my co-founding an organization to promote pro-social games which eventually took over running a national competition that has since reached over 32,000 students.
Meanwhile… in 2012 I left Global Kids and moved to the American Museum of Natural History. I did many things there, including innovative games-based learning and, yes, supporting Games for Change’s student challenge one year. But mostly I went deep into museums, my own and others, building a network of digital innovators across the country (in part through this very blog).
Now, in 2020, I get a call from Games for Change. They want to talk. Earlier this year they received a prestigious grant from the IMLS (the Institute of Museum and Library Services). It’s time to bring the student challenge into museums, through a new professional development offering called Game Up. It will build a community of museums offering youth-facing games-based learning programs. Each partner will receive training to use a curriculum (with a stipend) to be adapted around their own content and needs, supporting youth to design games (the theme this year: resilience) and compete in the national challenge.
Then Covid hit. No way to offer these trainings in person. The pivot – increase the number of participating museums – from 8 to 40! – and do the training online. So who did they know with expertise in both games-based learning and museums, who was available to jump in right away to recruit and onboard these new museums (and consult on the PD and curricular design for use in a museum-context)?
So bingo, there I was, on the phone – not only excited for the work, SO excited – but in my mind rapidly running through all of this history, and the causality chains, in my head, recognizing that that tiny room at SVA’s computer lab 18 years earlier led me on a path to help spread games-based learning around the country to, now, maybe hundreds or thousands of teens during the pandemic…
So yeah, I got a little choked up…
So again, if you are a museum or museum educator and want to take part, or have the skills and want to find a museum to partner with, please go here, fill out the 5-minute form, and I’ll be back in touch.
You game?
