Luma World’s approach to learning through play aligns with contemporary educational theories that emphasize active engagement, problem-solving, and hands-on experiences as effective learning methods. Their games are designed to be age-appropriate, culturally relevant, and engaging for children, potentially making them a popular choice for parents and educators seeking to supplement traditional education methods with interactive learning tools.

Ludogogy has had the opportunity to play six of Luma World’s most popular titles, so here is a mammoth-sized review of all six.

Galaxy Raiders

for age 9+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – A space-based game where players are trying to capture new planets and moons, while stopping other players from doing the same.

Teaches: Number operations, mental maths, resource management, long-term planning, reverse engineering and problem solving.

Galaxy Raiders consists of a number of hexagonal ‘planet boards’, marker pegs in four colours, an operation die, which shows all four basic maths operators and wildcard, cards with numbers on, ‘power cards’, which allow you to take actions which influence the game, and player console mats.

One more planet board than the number of players is used, and the winner is the first player to win two planet boards.

Players win a planet board by first ‘capturing’ the moons and then the planet. Each board has four moons and one planet, each with a target number on them.

On their go, a player rolls the die and uses that operator, and two of the number cards on their (openly displayed) player console, to achieve the target number on a moon or a planet (only after all four moons have been captured). They may then place a peg on that number position.

Power cards can be used to ‘Evict’ another player’s peg, ‘Replace’ another player’s peg with their own or to be able to use the ‘Any Number’ wild card in their calculation.

There are several additional rules around placing pegs and using power cards, which are dependent on game state (e.g. you can only replace someone in a planet if you have captured one of its moons), and it is these additional rules that make this more than just a game of mental arithmetic, and into one that requires strategic planning. This provides enough challenge for the older target age group, and will be fun also for adults.

The combination of the requirement for some quite complex thinking skills and a competitive ‘battleground’ will ensure that this game is replayable for some time to come.

The game is pitched at the 9+ age group and is very suitable for children at that age.  The planning and problem solving are the more complex aspects of the game, so it could be also be played in a ‘team’ format with younger children, with the younger child doing the calculations, and maybe an adult or older child taking the strategic planning role.

Overall an excellent game for school or home, to polish up those mental maths skills.

Crafty Puggles

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – Cute mole-like creatures attempt to be the first to reach hidden treasure by burrowing under the grounds of a stately home. A tile-placement and path-building game.

Teaches: Basic fractions, mental maths, pattern recognition, critical thinking, motor skills, creativity, planning & strategy

Crafty Puggles consists of a treasure game board on which square tiles are laid to create a path to the treasure. The square tiles are split into quadrants which are either mud (passable path) or grass (which block the path),and therefore also represent the fractions ¼, (a quarter mud, three quarters grass), ½ (50/50 mud and grass) and ¾ (a quarter mud, three quarters grass).

Each player also has their own ‘den mat’ where they can ‘bank’ tiles, and grow and use a ‘Puggle Boost’ feature, which allows them to play actions which affect their own or their opponent’s progress.

A fraction die is thrown to indicate which tile a player will take from the fraction. Each player is attempting to navigate from one corner of the board to the centre, and is therefore working within a quarter of the game.

An action die is also rolled and allows the player to; place a tile on an empty space on the game board (to, hopefully, extend your path), rotate a tile, either your own to improve, or your opponent’s to block their progress, move your puggle one step along the ‘Boost’, or move a ‘Hound’ playing piece (a blocker) to any blank space on the board, or to a tile showing the fraction you also threw.

The different mechanics of this game combine to provide a fun, engaging experience for young players, with just the right balance of acting to progress your own position and being able to use ‘take-that’ actions to mess with your opponent’s plans.

Playing this game will definitely flex skills in patterns recognition and in planning and strategy. The possible combinations of the two dice mean that players have to consider carefully from a large number of different play options, what will best move them towards their goal, encouraging critical and creative thinking.

The fractions offered in this game are quite limited, but that is appropriate for the target age group, and is more than made up for by the opportunities for strategic planning.

The fact that there are many combinations of possible actions, e.g. from the dice, and from the five possible options when you activate a Puggle Boost means that there is considerable replayability in this game, and it will keep young players coming back.

The ‘take that’ aspects of the game are a considerable source of fun and interaction, and will also be useful in teaching children how to deal with disappointment at having their plans spoiled.

Overall, I would recommend this game for 5 – 7 year olds, as a fun experience which also reinforces skills in planning to reach a specific goals through pattern matching. As a gateway game, it could be useful to teach the skills that could lead youngsters on to commercial tile-laying games such as Tsuro and Carcassonne.

Tsuro is available on Amazon

Carcassonne is available on Amazon

Guess the Fence

for age 8+, 30mins, 2 players – A game which uses the ‘Battleships’ mechanic of hiding your actions from your opponent, which you then have to deduce. Whoever first guesses correctly the shapes and positions of the fences built by their opponent, wins.

Teaches: Geometry, patterns, data interpretation and planning, imagination and creativity, taking calculated risks, visual reasoning, problem solving, communication, motor skills.

In Guess the Fence, each player has a board, which is hidden from their opponent’s view by a screen. Much like battleships, each player must position a set number of specific shapes on their board, and then attempt to find (by informed guessing) all their opponents shapes first, to win.

The shapes used are one each of: large triangle, square, small triangle and rectangle

In this case, the shapes are constructed from three different lengths of plastic ‘fence’, consisting of a straight length and a ‘vertex’ (a small round hoop). The shapes are built by laying the fences on the board with the vertices corresponding to numbered circles on the board.

There are rules for construction e.g. only two fences can join at a vertex, a fence must start and end at a vertex etc.

Again, like Battleships, a player can mark whether their guess has ‘Hit’ or ‘Miss’ on a wipe clean marking sheet, and use the information gained from that to inform further guesses.

Battleships is available on Amazon

Unlike Battleships, the player can choose to make one of two kinds of guess on a turn. They may call out a numbered vertex. If it is a hit, they mark that in green. If a miss, in red. Or they may choose to guess a whole shape, by calling out all its vertices ‘Do you have a triangle at 3, 4 and 9?’. A hit here will give them 3 points and they can colour the shape in green on the marking board. A miss attracts a -1 score.

The jeopardy created by the possibility of losing points for a wrong shape guess introduces a interesting twist on the standard Battleship game, further emphasising the need to discover and correctly analyse information as well as simply scoring lucky hits.

This is a great game for developing visual reasoning, and data interpretation, including the pretty high order skill of extrapolating general principles from rules and applying them in differing situations. The geometry involved may be a little simple for the target age group but the overall experience provides opportunities for a pretty complex sessions of planning and problem solving, in order to play well..

At first glance, this game does not appear to have as much replayability as, say, Crafty Puggles.  But then I remember how playing Battleships with my dad kept me engrossed for years worth of summer camping holidays. It’s the intense competition that does it. And for the same reason it’s a game which parents can quite happily play with their kids too.

As the communication is deliberately kept to a minimum in a game of hidden information such as this, it is not an obviously ‘social’ game, but it does require clear and concise communication – in itself, a very important skill for youngsters.

Overall, I would recommend this game for parents and children who relish the opportunity to compete directly, and that it is very suitable for developing the spatial and visual reasoning skills of children between 7 and 10 years.

Lord of the Bins

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 6 players – Find hidden value in garbage. A game about sorting and recycling rubbish

Teaches about: Different kinds of waste, segregation and sorting, caring for the environment, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption.

Where my wider family comes from in the North of England, there’s a saying. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”, meaning that there’s value in what usually gets thrown away. This is the premise behind this game. Junkland, where the game is set, is buried under a stinky heap of garbage, but the Lords of Junkland have realised there’s treasure to be found.

The major components of Lord of the Bins are cards; four different bin cards, eight Trump Trash Cards (yes, I know, I was thinking that too), and 60 trash cards representing different kinds of rubbish. Each trash card is numbered 1 to 9, where 1 is easy to compost or recycle, and 9 is difficult to do so.  Additionally, there are 25 yellow gems, 6 green gems (and a bag to keep them in),a key card token, a table listing all the different trash in the same four categories of the bin cards and a rather fetching raccoon hat.

Players hold hands dealt from a main deck of trash cards and trump trash cards shuffled together and each turn they take one more card from a ’marketplace’ of face-up trash cards. Depending on how many cards they choose to take and the current state of cards in the marketplace, they may also end up placing gems of marketplace cards, of picking up gems along with the cards they take.

Players then either play a single card (place it in its appropriate bin) or play a gem; an action which unlocks powerful strategic actions in the game, such as being able to play extra cards into bins.

Getting rid of cards is an important part of the game, as the winner is the player who has the lowest score when the game ends. A player’s score is the total of the numbers on all the cards still in hand.

The Raccoon hat comes into play as a punishment for being incorrect during a challenge. One player may challenge another if they feel that the first player has incorrectly placed garbage in a bin. The trash table is consulted to discover the truth of the matter, and whichever player was incorrect has to don the racoon hat and imitate a garbage eating animal.

Clearly, a player is likely to do better in this game, if they have a firm grasp on which garbage goes in which bin, and one of the main educational aims of this game is to get youngsters very familiar with these concepts. The raccoon hat provides an amusing way to inject some negative reinforcement into the game and discourage mistakes.

The rules of how cards can be placed into bins will also develop number sequencing skills, as players cannot place a card which does not ‘follow’ from one already placed.

This game has enough different combinations of components and therefore paths through the game, that it will remain replayable for some time, and I imagine that for the target age group of 6+, the raccoon hat itself will provide a sufficient to play this repeatedly even with, and maybe especially with, parents.

The strong narrative element of this game is also appealing to the target age group, with the winner being the victorious ‘Lord’ of Junkland, who has not only become rich, but done their bit to clean up the place they live.

The ‘challenge’ aspect of the game gives opportunities for considerable social interaction and will delight children, as there is always going to be someone who comes out of that looking silly in a raccoon hat.

Overall, as this game can be played by between 2 – 6players, I would recommend it both for home and the classroom for 6 – 10 y-o, where it could be used to support conversations around recycling and even housework responsibilities, and maybe for older end of the age group, around sustainability frameworks such as the SDGs.

Mystic Arts

for age 10+, 30mins, 3 – 4 players. A spell-casting game where players have to mix ingredients in the appropriate amounts and proportions to become the best wizard, or witch,  and win.

Teaches: Measurements, decimals, operations, conversion of units, mental maths, critical thinking, planning & strategy, decision making, focus

The theme of Mystic Arts will be very appealing to children drawn to Harry Potter and similar wizarding themed films and books. The aim of the game is to win by becoming the best potion maker. And as any witch or wizard knows, the key to great potions is accurate weights and measures.

The compact game is mostly card-based, and consists of three kinds. The first is ingredient cards – each ingredient also features a weight or measure (e.g. 1,800 ml of Honey Mead, or 2,300 mm of the Great Horn of the Dwarves). Spell cards endow actions that can affect the game, particularly to help you to win a potion by, for example manipulating a weight or measure. Potion cards come in two varieties, good potions and bad potions. Players must try to collect good potions while avoiding the bad ones.

When a potion is revealed, it will have a weight, a length and a volume. If it is good potion players will want to win it. They do so by selecting (in secret) one ingredient card from their hand which they hope will be CLOSEST to the same measurement unit on the potion card. If it is a bad potion, they will, conversely, choose an ingredient which they hope to be furthest away from the equivalent measurement on the potion card.

Players then reveal their choices, at the same time calling out the difference between their ingredient and the measurement on the potion card.

Spell cards can then be played to influence the outcome. For example a player who wants to win the potion may use a spell which exchanges their card with an opponent’s or changes the magnitude of their ingredient.

Play proceeds like this with the player who is the first to collect two good potions being the winner.

This game is very engaging – even for adults and older children. Due to limited access to very young children, my first playtest was with a 16 y-o, and we did choose to play it several times. The competitiveness and strategic aspects from the combination of using ingredients and spells to achieve your purpose, make it a balanced and fun experience.

The need to do conversion between different magnitudes of units (e.g. kilos and grams), in some cases, and to do rapid mental arithmetic, offer a good level of challenge to players, even those older than the target age. And the potential different combinations of cards that will come out in play, offering different experiences, mean that this game has considerable replayability.

Like all of the games reviewed here, (with the possible exception of Fracto), these games feel far more like commercial games that are intended for fun, rather than educational exercises which just happen to be games.

That is not meant to mean that they are not excellent educational tools – they are. It is rather a reflection of the skill of the designers to make great games, which children will want to play again and again, and which they will not see as ‘different’ from the other games that they play just for fun.

Playing Mystic Arts is a very sociable experience, because of the to-and-fro of trying to beat each other at winning (or losing) a potion, by using spell cards, if your initial ‘bid’ has not been successful. I would recommend for play both in the classroom, and at home, where it very well might become a family favourite.

Fracto

for age 8+, 15mins, 2 – 4 players. A game with 3 different variants, which focus on accuracy, speed and memory respectively. A card game of resource management in the jungle.

Teaches: Identifying fractions, operations with fractions, mental maths, visual reasoning, communication, strategy

Fracto offers three different card games in one compact box, containing 80 fraction cards, with the fractions shown in four different ways, as vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅔), in words (e.g. two thirds), as pictograms (e.g. one lion outlines and two full-colour lions, indicating ⅔) or pie chart or similar diagram.

In the first game WHOLE-IN-1, and in  DECK OF FORTUNE players win by discarding their whole hand. Cards can only be discarded in whole pairs (i.e both cards together add up to a whole 1). There are slight variations in the way the two games are played, so some players might find one more fun than the other.

MEMORY HERO is a variation on the whole pair theme, by incorporating a memory game too. Players have to make whole pairs but also have to remember cards that have been previously turned over in order to make more pairs than their opponents.

The game play of the suggested games is quite simple but appropriate for the 8+ target age, although they could be played with younger players too.

However the real value in these cards, I feel, is that they are a versatile set of components, which teachers, parents, and even children themselves could use to devise their own fraction based games, opening up possibilities, to not just become familiar with different ways of expressing fractions (which all these games do very well), but to explore higher order thinking skills of system design and critical thinking which games design requires.

Quality of Materials

The components of these games are visually appealing, and generally of high quality. The boards, in particular, are  and sturdy and durable. Tiles are likewise. Some playing pieces are made of cardboard, where they could have been more durable if made of wood, and the paper used in manuals can be a bit flimsy (but they are packaged in envelopes for protection). However, this is reflected in the very reasonable price points for these games, and on balance, it is better that the games are more widely accessible than that they are made of luxury materials.

The boxes are well designed. Everything has a place to be packed away neatly and there are smaller boxes to contain game pieces and components.

Many of the game guides also contain a QR code to access extremely well put together and informative video how to play guides

All in all, these games would be a high quality addition to your school or home educational game cupboard.

Check out reviews of other games, books and other game-related stuff.

The post Review – Luma World Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

In this game, each player must use a combination of critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills in order to be successful. Each player has to consider the advantages and disadvantages of each decision, and must collaborate with other players to acquire resources and build settlements. In the end, the player who is able to use their skills to make the most strategic decisions and effectively communicate with their fellow players is the winner. 

Settlers of Catan is available on Amazon

Games such as Settlers of Catan are a great example of how SEL skills can be used to make a difference to our interpersonal experiences. These skills can be invaluable in a variety of real-world situations, from classroom projects to business meetings. To dive deeper into this context, we interviewed Manik and Chelsea from Tomo Club for this month’s edition of Ludogogy. Tomo Club uses social games to teach skills in video meets to K-12 students. These games and meets are moderated by trained professionals who keep an eye on the activity and ensure students make progress on their learning goals.

Q. What is the importance of SEL skills in today’s world, according to you?

A. It is essential that the new generation of students is equipped with SEL skills, also called 21st century and life skills. These skills, such as collaboration and critical thinking, are necessary for today’s complex world. They are integral in helping young people to learn how to interact with others, how to manage their emotions, and how to develop self-confidence and resilience. They provide a foundation for success in academic, professional, and personal domains. Without them, the new generation will struggle to compete in the global economy and reach their full potential.

Q. How has the importance of critical thinking in particular changed recently?

A. Today, there are tools like ChatGPT that have sorted out small-scale tasks, enabling us to focus on larger areas like decision-making and strategy. Now the crucial part is to know how to use such resources, which is where critical thinking plays a role. In the near future, more emphasis will be placed on creativity, teamwork, and problem solving – from the workplace to the personal domain. It’s important to figure out what to do and align people to achieve goals – as the “how” behind such work is getting simpler with more resources to the modern person.

Q. Usually game-based learning has a challenge of being assessed and tested conclusively. How do you present progress and test learning in students?

A. We use an elaborate, descriptive rubric that is broken into competencies, subskills, and even further into 40 subskills. Each of these subskills have descriptors that can be used to evaluate and understand individual performance. In order to do this, the teacher and teaching assistant must sit together and discuss each child’s performance and provide remarks, as well as recommendations. This ensures that the evaluations are thorough and that no student is overlooked.

The teacher and teaching assistant actively engage with the students to provide guidance and support. This includes providing feedback and advice on different strategies, helping the student stay motivated, and generally being a mentor. 

Q. Who are the people involved in delivering an experience like yours?

A. We have a small, lean team that starts with the development of a suitable curriculum, then progresses to game design, art, development, followed by rigorous testing. This process begins with adults as well as children, in different geographical locations to gauge reactions. Remarkably, although children have different contexts and curricula, their behaviors and preferences for fun in games remain surprisingly similar – unlike adults. This has implications for game design as it indicates that despite geographical differences, children’s responses to games can be consistent.

Q. Games are synonymous with fun. It’s easy to give feedback that praises someone for their activity in a game. But how do you give critical feedback that addresses negative behaviors, considering children like to play games specifically for fun?

A. It’s the feedback on what we did wrong that is more beneficial in learning. Our moderators are highly trained in providing feedback that is constructive in nature. If turns are broken in the conversation, for example, it is important to give specific feedback to the individual. 

A report is shared with the parents of the student so that they can better understand the feedback. There is a section called Collaboration and Action, where resources and videos are provided to both parents and children to watch together. This helps all parties understand the feedback in a deeper way and encourages an interactive experience.

You can take a demonstration of the experience in Play And Learn events organized by Tomo Club on alternate Saturdays, where educators, parents, and curious minds try games like Secret Santa and Crisis Crew :

Q. What would be your advice to someone wanting to use games in their classrooms?

A. To integrate games effectively, our advice is to consider the context of the learner. For working with adults, providing specific, exact instructions is usually best. With kids, however, it can be tricky to give a lot of instructions, as this overwhelms them. The more we delay gratification, the better equipped the kids will be to manage stress. 

Understanding a game requires familiarity, so allow players time to get familiar with it. If a game is difficult, you can scaffold it, breaking it down into smaller, easier tasks, and then building on them as the learner progresses. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, learning SEL skills is crucial for personal and social development, and doing so in a social and fun way can make the experience even more effective and enjoyable. As evidenced by the various initiatives and programs offered by organizations like Tomo Club, engaging in activities such as games can help individuals cultivate skills like self-awareness, empathy, and communication. Incorporating SEL skills into social and fun activities can benefit individuals of all ages and backgrounds, leading to greater well-being and success in all aspects of life. The testimonials of participants in Tomo Club’s SEL programs also provide insight into this impact. Organizations like Tomo Club are making a significant difference in the lives of learners by providing opportunities to learn and grow in a socially engaging and enjoyable way. You can try these games and experiences in online events every alternate Saturday that you can register for here : https://lu.ma/gamesandeducation

The post Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) with Tomo Club first appeared on Ludogogy.

Such learning is necessarily very loaded with content. If a master is to be able to pass down all they know and are able to do, and to ensure that pupils become upstanding citizens with no undesirable ideas or behaviours, then there need to be artefacts for them to teach from. This would certainly have been imparted verbally (lectures), or in writing, if the pupil could read; from examples of work, which should be copied to learn skills; and through commandments, and rewards and punishments.

What is content free learning?

Increasingly however, there has been a shift towards learning models and pedagogies which shift the focus away from the ‘Sage on the Stage’ and onto the role of the learner. Terms such as ‘learner-centred’ and ‘facilitative learning’, have come to the fore, and techniques such as problem-based learning, social learning and, of course, games-based learning are now widely used.

If we imagine that all learning experiences are on a continuum. At one end are highly passive experiences, where the educator is responsible for ‘filling up’ the empty vessel that is the learner. The learning has little or no agency, and there is little requirement for them to exercise creativity in what or how they learn. They need to simply apply themselves to absorbing and emulating the learning content that are presented with.

Most learning experiences today, fall somewhere in the middle, with a mix of instruction from a ‘Sage’ and a variety of activities where the learner is encouraged to exercise some creativity and autonomy, and to take a greater degree of responsibility towards their own learning. This is a more facilitative model, where the educator is there to guide but not ‘teach’, answer questions if they arise, and point them towards resources from which they can construct their own learning.

In the example above, while the learner is ‘set free’ to discover and construct learning, it is still likely that there will be content, related to the domain of learning, and potentially even more of that than if they had attended a lecture from a ‘sage’ – case studies, Internet scavenger hunts, simulation games, videos to watch etc. – all of which have originated, maybe not with the sage who is in the room with them, but with some sage somewhere.

At the other extreme of the continuum, there is what I like to think of as ‘content-free’ learning. The learner will be given access to resources or process, but these may be generic, and have no relationship to the knowledge, skill or attitude that the learner is accessing. In this case, the learning is entirely constructed from the interaction of the individual or group with the activities and reflection which these resources facilitate.

Content-free learning – pros and cons…

There is no assumption that any point on the continuum is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other point, simply that educators and learners are able to access the appropriate level of learner creativity and autonomy for whatever learning needs to take place. It would be inappropriate, for example, for learners to ‘discover’ for themselves the proper safety procedures and checklists for parachute jumping, just as would be inappropriate for a facilitator to ‘instruct’ a learner about the learner’s own lived experience, in a session exploring mental health issues.

‘Content-free’ learning is therefore most suited to situations where the learners are the ‘experts’.  Coaching is a good example of this. A coach does not tell a coachee what to do or think, but simply facilitates the drawing out of knowledge, wisdom (new insights constructed from existing knowledge) and ideas for action, from the coachee.

Another excellent use-case for content-free learning is facilitative group work, where it is assumed that the group contains wisdom (and collective skills) that is greater than the sum of the individual wisdom contained within it.

In both these cases, there is no need for an educator to bring any ‘content’ to the situation. So, what do they bring? What does content-free learning look like?

At the heart it is about process, so a skilled facilitator may be needed to set that process in motion and to ensure that it stays on track. Some content-free learning is nothing but process, while in other cases there may, in fact be content. This might seem contradictory, but usually this content will be unrelated to the intended learning. It is intended as stimulus, which will be used a lens through which the learner can approach the question in hand.

…And some examples

A well-known and archetypal example of content-free learning, that is all about process is Lego® Serious Play®.  The bricks on the table have no meaning attached to them at all until the process of putting them together in response to a stimulus begins. The stimulus is a question, and all the meaning, the ‘content’, is entirely derived from the minds of the individual model builders, and later from the interactions of the rest of the group with their own and each other’s models. Layers of process, each building on the one before can be applied, if appropriate, to facilitate everything from simple individual insights, to the extrapolation of strategic guiding principles for large complex organisations.

The greater the reliance on pure process, the greater the need for skilled facilitation. Content-free tools which are richer in stimuli can often be used with or without a facilitator. Because these tools do not need to transfer large quantities of knowledge or demonstrate skills, they are often very compact and portable. Cards are a popular choice of format, and pretty much any ‘facilitation deck’ you can think of will fall into this category, with images and questions often being the go-to stimuli.

Two of my own decks demonstrate different approaches, and show that slight differences in process or stimulus can make for very different applications.

The Gift Horse is available either as a PDF or a card deck on Deckible. It was inspired by Brave Sparrow, The Kiss of Walt Whitman, Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’, and Street Wisdom (mentioned below). It is quite introspective in nature, and is designed to bring about (either guided by a facilitator or individually) reflection on an individual’s questions. The player navigates the question(s) with the help of an animal, which has attached itself to them. It can be used a part of a finite game session or as a daily practice. For example, an individual faced with a dilemma might as themselves ‘What would my octopus do?’ or ‘What special abilities does my animal have to help me through this?’. This approach is designed to encourage divergent thinking by viewing questions through a different lens than one’s own everyday experience.

The Museum of Impossible Objects, on the other hand, is more outward looking. It consists of a set of cards, each of which shows an image and exhibit label for an item which is held in a strange museum. Many of the objects are supernatural, or in some way extraordinary. On the backs of the cards are open-ended questions about the exhibits, supposedly placed in the museum visitors’ minds by the museum itself, which has a strong psychic field.

The Museum of Impossible Objects is available on Deckible

The Museum cards can be used simple writing prompts, (probably in the weird fiction genre) but can also be used to start discussion around fundamental questions of ethics, politics and so on, and could be used in Philosophy, Critical Thinking and Personal and Social Development classrooms, among others. Speculative fiction, such as fantasy or sci-fi has always done an excellent job of allowing us to ask ourselves these difficult questions, with that one step of ‘remove’ which makes the discourse ‘safer’. For example, the Ghost Jar exhibit is a device which is used to trap ghosts carrying out ‘malicious hauntings’. It is displayed, complete with an occupant, in the museum. The questions on the reverse of the card ask visitors to think about who it is that decides that a haunting is ‘malicious’, and what rights, if any, should be accorded to the ‘sentient dead’.

Although the cards point learners towards certain topics, they don’t contain any ‘content’ on those topics, as such. While the questions and stimulus might lead to very deep discussions on crime and punishment; who makes the rules; the treatment of ‘the other’, including refugees, people with disabilities, or even other species; and the ethics of displaying the remains of living beings; the cards don’t provide the content on these questions. All of that must be sourced elsewhere.

Street Wisdom, is another highly process-driven form of learning, where the stimulus is a personal question of concern, and the surroundings experienced on a mindful walk. First the walker goes through a series of simple exercises to tune into their surroundings. Then holding the question in mind, they walk with heightened awareness of what they can see, hear, smell and touch around them, until some particular element presents itself as a complete or partial answer.

This has quite a lot in common with the Gift Horse, or indeed other tools of intuition such as the Tarot. While a road-sign (Street Wisdom), the fact that an octopus has three hearts (Gift Horse), or the High Priestess card (Tarot), do have inherent attached meanings, it is not those meanings, but the individual interpretations of them, fuelled by intuition, or previous experience or feelings of coincidence, which bring the learning.

Can learning be truly ‘content-free’

I have recently been experimenting with the idea of removing as much meaning as possible from the tools (in this case, again, cards) I am making for content-free learning. The idea behind this is to create tools that give the greatest autonomy and potential for creativity to the learner, when constructing their own meaning, and from that, their own learning.

Clean Language is a facilitation technique designed to remove the facilitators ‘content’ input when posing questions. It does this by using a fixed structure of questions in which the only ‘content’ is the respondent’s words mirrored back to them. In this technique, metaphor is seen as important in creating meaning, so the clean language technique seeks to strip out any of the facilitator’s meanings and suggested metaphors, to enable the respondent to discover their own without contamination. To contrast the use of non-clean questioning, with clean questioning, a non-clean follow up question to a respondent’s statement of ‘I feel odd’, might be ‘Do you think you have Covid?’ or more metaphorically ‘Are you under the weather?’. A clean question might be ‘And where do you feel odd?’, or ‘And what kind of odd?’

Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds is available on Amazon

Deliberately Meaningless

The primary purpose of most presented images and text is to convey meaning, so trying to use those to create stimulus, while conveying the bare minimum of meaning, calls for some level of obfuscation and manipulation. Asemic text uses different character sets, and may change the text orientation, from that usually used by the person writing the text. Asemic text is different from a code, however, as it deliberately has no meaning, and cannot be decoded or translated into something which has meaning.

Some artificial languages are ‘codes’, in that they have meanings and can therefore be translated. Klingon, for example, can be learned on Duolingo, and poems written in Tolkein’s Quenya can also be read and enjoyed in other languages.  Other constructed languages, are, or may be, completely asemic, like the writing in the Codex Seraphinianus or the Voynich Manuscript. In the case of the latter, we simply don’t know if it is translatable or not, and it is this ambiguity which makes asemic text so good for content-free learning.

The Codex Seraphinianus is available on Amazon

The Voynich Manuscript is available on Amazon

The deck I currently have in development uses asemic text, and deliberately ‘strange’ images, to encourage learners to construct their own meanings when they interact with them. I also want to make the nature and purpose of the deck as a whole as ambiguous as possible. Is it a game, a method of divination, a set of index cards containing a knowledge base, a holy text – or something else entirely.

It is this aspect of design that has been most challenging, because we recognise and associate specific formats and layouts with specific purposes. A card taken from a game looks like a card taken from a game, but I am hopeful that I can achieve an acceptable level of ambiguity.

But why would something without meaning be useful in learning?

It is precisely because human always seek meaning, even and perhaps especially, when there is none, that such ‘asemic’ tools are useful. We are pattern detecting creatures, and particularly when those patterns are important to us. This is seen most markedly in the phenomenon of ‘face pareidolia’ – seeing faces, which are not really there, in everyday objects.

The human need to find meaning in the seemingly meaningless has given us religious beliefs, creation myths and the scientific method, among many other staggering instances of creative imagination.

When faced with something which is without meaning, a creative impulse is sparked, and that is the intention of these cards. With no more information or instruction than ‘What are these? How do they work? You have x hours. Go!’, you free a team of people to ideate and create, to find meaning, and innovate in ways that are important and relevant to their needs and goals, without the burden of externally imposed ‘content’.

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While knowledge, and the dissemination of facts is important – we have seen the results when misinformation and disinformation, is widely spread, it would appear that simply ’knowing more’, or having access to ‘better’ information is not enough to foster meaningful action on some of our most pressing issues.

How Games Move US – Emotion by Design is available on Amazon

Knowledge is like a raw material, but we need properly honed tools to work with it to achieve something. One important cognitive tool is critical thinking, but even that proves to be lacking when it comes to action such as protecting the future of the planet, aiding and protecting vulnerable others (human and otherwise) or recognising the morality (or otherwise) of specific actions.

We may ‘know’ the rights and wrongs of some situation, but still find ourselves choosing inaction, or looking away. It seems only emotional ‘tools’ are enough to tip us into action. Empathy is often cited as chief among these. Surely if we could only ‘step into the shoes’ of the desperate people who have travelled to these shores in small boats, we could never consider packing them into planes and sending them to Rwanda, for example.

But is it as simple as that, and if it is, how can games-based learning, or gameful design make us more empathic?

Types of Empathy

The above example shows us only one kind of empathy, however. According to psychologists, there are three types. If we were moved (and, importantly, also had the agency) to make the decision to act humanely towards refugees and not send them to Rwanda, we would be exercising Compassionate empathy.

That, in turn could have been prompted by either of the other two kinds of Empathy.

Cognitive empathy is an intellectual understanding of the feelings of another person. It is important in communication, because it allows us to state our thoughts in a way that will effectively reach the other person. Sometimes called ‘hard’ empathy, it is important to remember that this is not equivalent to being ‘unfeeling’. This is the kind of empathy that needs to be exercised by those in the medical or caring professions. If they allowed themselves to feel the third kind of empathy, they would likely buckle under the emotional strain, and be unable to care effectively for themselves or others.

Emotional empathy is sometimes described as ‘feeling what others feel’. It is a deeper identification with the emotional state of another. Deanna Troi, the Star Trek empath, exhibited this form of empathy, where she actually shared the emotions of the person she was feeling. If we are not half Betazoid, we usually do this by remembering what we felt like when going through a similar experience, or if we have not had such an experiencing, by imagining what it would feel like if we did.

Who or what can we have empathy for?

I once designed a game, which was billed as ‘eliciting empathy for an ecosystem’. In reality, this is impossible, for two reasons. Empathy as it is described above, can only ever really be felt for other members of our own species. It requires that we understand and share the same cognitive processes. We cannot ‘share’ or even have intellectual understanding of our cat’s feelings, because we have no idea what cat emotions are like. This obviously applies even more to non-sentient entities such as ‘The Planet’, or an ecosystem (even though they comprise living beings).

However, we can exercise something that looks and feels a lot like empathy in two ways. Firstly, we do have a ‘recognition’, if not an understanding, of what certain emotional states, such as distress, look like when they are demonstrated, so we can act to prevent or mitigate them, of keep acting in the same way to enhance what looks to us like ‘happiness’.

Secondly, and starting to move into ‘playfulness’, we can imagine what it would be like to be both ourselves (with all the cognitive and emotional equipment that implies), and the entity we are trying to ‘empathise’ with. We anthropomorphise the animal and endow it with human feelings and thought processes. Arguably we can do the same with ‘The Planet’. Indeed, the concept of Gaia does this very thing.

And this is an important idea to consider if we want to design learning games, or other playful activities to facilitate empathy. Research has shown that the more (evolutionarily) distant a species is from us, the less likely we are to show compassion for it. This is why cuddly mammals work much better as poster children for environmental charities, even when snails or insects may have more ecosystem ‘importance’ in the specific ecological niche being discussed. So, this first step of making an entity ‘more like’ us when designing an empathy intervention, may have considerable impact on its effectiveness

Playful Empathy

Game which have empathy as a central theme often put us in ‘another person’s shoes’. Of course, there are no limits of the characters we can play in a game setting, so this would imply that they are an ideal medium for allowing us to play other genders or races, or to experience cognitive or physical differences, or even to live in another time or be another species.

Bury Me My Love is an immersive and affecting experience of the story of a Syrian refugee, but you don’t always have to play the victim or the ‘good guy’ to appreciate how systems affect people’s actions and outcomes Papers Please, puts you in the role of a border guard and is an increasingly uncomfortable experience as you play.

Another game which takes you into the experience of a refugee is Salaam by Lual Mayen,

While these games allow you to play a role, if you are after an actual tabletop RPG, then the ultimate tabletop experience is provided by Logan – where you get to play (your own) version of the designer’s real-life experiences.

The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr, a board game, puts you into a medical care setting, where you work as part of a medical team caring to a terminally ill man. Can you keep him alive long enough to hear his story, which also will reveal the story of those caught up in the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland? Thank you to Michala Liavaag for telling me about this game.

Human beings are wired to respond to narrative, and again, this is where games and similar playfully designed experience perform well. Many award winning titles such as Life is Strange and If Found use queer and trans characters and rich storytelling to present queer experience that moves well beyond stereotypes to present a the full gamut of emotional highs and lows

And because playful design doesn’t have to mean ‘games’, we can visit the wonderful travelling exhibits of the Empathy Museum to hear real stories, told by real voices in the Human Library exhibit, among many others.

Immersion is an important characteristic of games which aim to elicit empathy, and all the above meet that brief. But if you want to technological help, then VR would seem to be the logical choice. Project Empathy is all about making impactful experiences for social awareness and change. Their first project was based in a US prison.

One of the most famous empathy principles, which has been around for way longer than games-based learning is the ‘Seven Generation’ principle of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which requires that every action one takes should be viewed in terms of its impact on the seventh generation which will follow you.

There are a number of ‘playful’ activities based on this idea. One particular favourite of mine involves both reflection on the future impacts of one’s actions as well as encouraging some analysis of your own moral compass, as you have to explain yourself. The premise is simple – take a piece of paper and write to your seventh generation descendants, explaining why are doing what you are doing, or making the decisions that feel necessary now.

Examples I would like to give here, but cannot think of any games which quite meet the criteria just now are:

• Something that takes the 7 generation idea and expands on it to emphasise one’s role in a long ‘chain’ of life with impacts from decisions which reverberate down the decades, centuries and millennia.
• A game where you play both the impacting ‘bad-guy’ and the unfortunate victim of their decisions, with equal emphasis. I did create a game like this, but it is my client’s IP (and part of an internal corporate learning programme) so I can’t use it as an example.

If you know any such games, I’d love to hear about them, so they can take their proper place in this article.

The post The What and Why of Empathy in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

So, imagine my joy at discovering a game, or actually, a collection of games, which require no materials at all, beyond the complex computer situated between your ears, and has the subtitle ‘By Yourself’.

Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself is a collection of 10 games, gathered by Editors Sam Gorski and D.F. Lovett. They discovered six volumes of the original 14 volume set by J Theophrastus Bartholomew at a yard sale in 2015, and have selected these ten as being their favourites from those.

Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself: Second Edition available at Amazon 

Each game provides you with a series of stimuli for you to create a character and setting for your game, more accurately, to elaborate on the skeleton character and setting suggested for you.  For example, the first game, Adventure, casts you as an Indiana Jones/Lara Croft type (depending on your gender choice) who is about to embark on the exploration of a tomb in 1940s Egypt. The exact specification of the tomb is decided by you as part of the process of preparing yourself to play, as are your age, your nationality and politics, or even whether you are undead or not. You have a choice of disturbing childhood memories to draw upon as motivation/distraction during your adventure.

Once you have gone through the detailed preparation, you are ready to begin the game – which starts in the same way for each game – with the single word ‘GO’. You then sit quietly, on your own and play your chosen game, interacting with the characters you have imagined, walking the terrain described by maps you have drawn in your imagination, and seeing what becomes of you.

At the end of the book, you can read some of the experiences of those who have played these games before. You can read about Brad who accidentally assassinated the wrong person when playing ‘Murder Night’ and planted his gun on the Butler. You can recoil in horror at the idea that Chris nearly starved to death when playing ‘Dungeons’.

Playing with your Shadow Self

Before you start to play any of the games there is a practice exercise where you get to literally split yourself in two – your own self and your Shadow Self, and then play a simple game – a bit like the Tray Memory game, where your Shadow Self goes into a house and steals an object.  You then have to go back into the house and work out what it is they have stolen. My Shadow stole a Yard of Ale.  I have no idea why, and I also have no idea how they managed to hide it about their person as we passed in the entrance to the house.

Some of the games are also played with your Shadow Self. In fact, playing against your Shadow Self is considered the Expert version of the ‘Chess’ game.  The Shadow Self also provides something of a Red Thread running through the book, as after some of the games, you are asked to return to the house you imagined (Your Sanctuary) and hide something you have just brought back from your latest game. At the end, your treasures provide you with an opportunity to reflect and reminisce.

Games of Hard Fun

There is no denying that the core activity of this book is much, much more difficult to do than the simple instructions would imply, but perseverance pays off. The skills are much more akin to meditation, or guided daydreaming than ‘playing a game’, although I think that long-term practice of the games in this book might make the time spent alone living other lives in your head, feel more playful and less like a repeated failure to stay focused.

Some games designers reading this may well find inspiration to create similar games, but I think it would be difficult to design a form of these games that would be playable quickly, for most people.  I would suggest that the greatest value of this book, comes therefore, from its potential as a tool for exercising your own creativity and improving storytelling skills, which is essential for practitioners in our field.

This, if we were to apply the work of Nicole Lazzaro, is most definitely Hard Fun, both in the sense that the practice itself is difficult, but also in the sense that the things that you discover about yourself, through working and playing with your Shadow Self, can also be challenging.

A deeply strange, but beguiling book, highly recommended if you want to dip into the games to learn how to play creatively on your own, but also because there is an easter egg which gives the whole thing a really satisfying symmetry – and which will make you smile when you work it out.

Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head, By Yourself: Second Edition available at Amazon 

The post Review of  Games you can Play in your Head first appeared on Ludogogy.

Complexity in Creating Teams

The book is divided into three parts, logically taking us through the process of first, creating teams who will be equipped to deal with complexity, then identifying, assessing and adapting to complexity, and finally the practice of co-creation as a strategy to address complexity in a project, delivery initiative and in the whole organisation.

Although this book, as I mentioned, is aimed at software development teams, it has a number of applications for the reader of Ludogogy – learning professionals, games-based or otherwise, and designers of games or other playful experiences.

First, as a topic area. Learning Professionals working with organisations or with topics which involve complexity; climate change, racism and other systemic wicked problems will find models in here that are applicable way beyond the Agile team. For example, the section on Estimating Complexity by Liz Keogh would be an excellent addition to any learning session inviting learners to reflect carefully on the complexity of some aspect of organisational life – a change initiative or a project plan, for example.

Models and Practice in Complexity

Second, the book presents models and practices for working in design and development teams outside the software development arena, for example, learning and tabletop games design. Section 1 of the book is applicable to almost any team that is expecting to deal with some form of complexity – which describes most teams. The practices in this part of the catalogue address approaches to get the best out of the tendency of teams to self-organise (if not hindered from doing so). For example, Joseph Pelrine’s ‘Basic Model’ describes how the four prerequisites of a self-organising human system – which encompasses the team, its surrounding environment and those form outside who nevertheless have to interact with the team.

These prerequisites are: Critical Mass – the team must of a certain minimum size before emergent behaviour occurs; Diversity and Dissent – a diverse team avoids the evils of Groupthink and blindspots, an Environment large enough to work comfortably but small enough that people will necessarily interact; and Letting People Do It – Management get out of the way and let the team get on with it.

Complexity Control Knobs

Thirdly, for those of us actively involved in games design, this book provides excellent source material for game mechanisms and aesthetics. In the first part of the book, many of the practices are presented with accompanying ‘Control knobs’. These were part of what Pelrine originally offered as the ‘control knob’ analogy provides a way to think about deliberate design of the practices. For example, in the model above, the knobs which can be turned to find the optimum settings for a team are Team Size, Team Boundaries – who is in and who is out, and Roles. Minudel expands the use of the ‘knobs’ to the other, non-Pelrine, models in part one.

These even look like the kinds of controls one might get in a video game, and suggest, at least to me the way in which these models and practices could be implemented in scenario-based simulations and games which would allow players to test the efficacy of different approaches in a business or team setting.

Early in the book, you find a suggestion on how to approach decisions in a self-organising system, which has relevance to what we do when we design games, because what is a group of people playing a game if not a self-organising system? At the beginning of Part 3 there is a description of co-creation – also an important dynamic in collaborative games.

A Simple Format for Presenting Complexity

There is a standard format to the way that each of the practices is presented in the book. There is an overview which outlines in brief what the model or practice does. Then its Purpose is described, followed by an explanation of its Relation to Complexity (Theory). A fuller description of the practice/model follows, including diagrams and ‘control knobs’ (if applicable). Finally there is a section entitled ‘Practical Tips and Stories’ which includes ‘What now’ , ‘When’, How to’ and ‘What next’ tips, which give practical examples of the model in use, and stories which illustrate some or all of these in more detail.

The book also provide links to Complexity resources online and elsewhere and contains detailed biographies of all the people whose models appear in the book, so it is an excellent starting point for learning more about Complexity. But this book is most definitely focused in practice, so while the theory is there to a certain extent, the most valuable thing to be taken from reading this book is that you can immediately apply what you read.

Living Complexity is available at https://leanpub.com/livingcomplexity/ and with a discount voucher worth $6 at https://leanpub.com/livingcomplexity/c/DtFB1ESGuJn4

The post Review – Living Complexity by Luca Minudel first appeared on Ludogogy.

Ideas are embedded in social arrangements, which in turn produce effects.

This is, in itself, a very simple idea, but the power of the insights that can be achieved if you go along with this idea, is great indeed.

In the main the ideas that are examined in this book are the more unpleasant ones that humanity has managed to come up with. Racism, Misogyny, ideas about power which bolster Inequality. And the DS4SI put forward very convincing arguments, supported by examples of their own interventions, that we can design our way out of these societal ills.

In some ways this review is a taster for what is to come from the next issue of Ludogogy (Systems Thinking – due out in January), as this book is mostly definitely rooted in a Systems Design approach, fully acknowledging the complexity and interconnectedness of the ideas, arrangements and effects we see all around us.  With that complexity, there often comes a sense of defeat, that some problems are simply too big and too difficult for us to find solutions.

IAE provides us with a framework and a set of tools to overcome this sense of defeat, firstly by understanding the social contexts one wishes to change and then by designing the new version one truly wants, either by intervening in existing arrangements or imagining new ones.

The use of the framework and tools is amply illustrated by example of DS4SI’s own interventions such as their Public Kitchen, Lighting the Bridge (a project exploring safety and geographical division) and “Is this chair own reason why…?” (a project looking at the arrangement of the chair and how it informs power relationships, among other things, in education).

Starting to Notice

On reading this book, one starts to notice ideas, arrangements and effects everywhere, and this increased awareness brings with it a heightened sense of opportunities for design. With regular use of the tools outlined in this book, you will definitely find that the ideas start to come, regularly and rapidly.

So, what does this have to do with games or gamification. In my opinion, there are two ways in which the ideas in this book can be used when designing games ‘for good’, but just as importantly when designing games for learning or even just for fun.

Games design can embrace the ideas in this book as a new tool when designing games to tackle social issues. There are a multitude of techniques and processes which can be brought to bear. These will help to create games which reveal the hidden arrangements all around us, allowing our players to make a start in redesigning their social and physical environments, to bring about a more equitable and kind society.

As well as this direct use of the tools in the book, we can also use it as a sanity check of our work in general. Even if the game you are designing is ‘just for fun’, the principles of IAE can help you to ensure that you are not bolstering ideas and arrangements which perpetuate effects which disadvantage and discriminate.

I can recommend this little book highly to anyone involved in design of any kind, not just games design.  It is available for purchase at https://www.ds4si.org/bookshop, and please do that if you are able, because the proceeds will help DS4SI to continue their work.
It is also available via this Amazon link (which would also bring in some commission for Ludogogy)

Ideas Arrangements Effects is available on Amazon

But if the price of the book is beyond your means, DS4SI have also made it available for free in a number of locations including https://c4aa.org/2020/05/ds4si-has-a-new-book or on Scribd https://www.scribd.com/

The post Review – Ideas Arrangements Effects by DS4SI first appeared on Ludogogy.

I got an email a while back about a five-course specialisation in Futures Thinking. It sounded really interesting, and a major attraction was that it was being taught by Jane McGonigal. I signed up for the first course, and even went so far as handing over my credit card details knowing fine well I wasn’t going finish during a 7-day trial period. Come to think of it – maybe it was my parsimoniousness that caused the six-year hiatus – once Coursera went to a paid model.

Each course consists of four ‘weeks’ (although they are completely self-paced). I’m currently in week one of Course Four. It is a shame I didn’t go a bit faster, because it is this course which is potentially of most interest to Ludogogy readers, as it is about using games to forecast the future. I will probably post a review of the last two courses between the June and July issues.

Course One: Ready, Set, Future! Introduction to Futures Thinking

In this we learn why we might want to do Futures Thinking, what professional futurists do and we are introduced to the ‘raw materials’ of Futures Thinking – Signals.  Signals are all around us. They are real things happening now, which suggest a potential future development. A signal could be a newspaper headline, an image, a new tecnology, or even a creative work like a novel or film.

Futurists take signals and extrapolate potential futures in the form of forecasts. Among the other tools presented in this course are the ‘Four Square Game’, to discover your own attitude towards and specific future, and ‘looking back to look forwards’ – using historical events to to create a timeline which can then be extrapolated into the future.

Course Two: Forecasting Skills: See the Future Before it Happens

The second course looks to build specific skills in forecasting, building on the concepts of the first course.  Alongside Signals, we now work with Drivers – the underlying forces behind the signals we have been spotting – which answers the question “What future force is driving the change this signal represents?”  For example, we might see a signal in the successful implementation of a new robotic technology, being used to carry out simple task for elderly people, and we might decide that one of the drivers of this is an ageing population.

A number of new tools are introduced in this course, and there is plenty of practice in the process of finding signals and drivers and combining those into forecasts.  For me the most enjoyable aspect of this course was taking a forecast and creating a scenario – a specific story based in the forecast future – fleshing out the bones with a narrative about a specific person living in your imagined future.

Course Three: Simulation Skills: This is Your Brain on the Future

This course is packed with new thinking skills to practise. We learn how to predict the past and remember the future – both ‘counter-factual’ techniques where one imagines a different past as if it really happened or a potential future which has never happened, as vividly as if it were a memory. Both of these prepare the mind for creating realistic details and vivid scenarios for futures you’ve never directly experienced.

Along with ‘Hard Empathy’, the ‘Experiential Ladder’ and numerous other techniques, we are ultimately prepared to create compelling visions of the future which appeal to all the senses, or even cross over into reality through the creation of concrete artifacts from the future.

Course Four: Collaborative Foresight: How to Game the Future

I’m only a very short way into this, so I can’t really tell you how it’s going. But I can give you a summary, courtesy of the ‘cheat sheet’ – a document conveniently provided with each of the courses, which tells you what to expect.

In this course I am expecting to (among many other things):

• Collaborate with others on building futures
• Use a future wheel to draw out surprising consequences
• Practice positive and shadow imagination (optimistic and pessimistic futures)
• Conduct massively multiplayer forecasting games
• Define epic wins that help solve urgent problems

It is especially fascinating to be taking these courses just now.  Covid-19 is still a major issue, and the focus of Course Three was on using newly learnt skills to forecast a future pandemic situation (it is clear from the videos that the course was finalised before the pandemic). I’m not sure if the course designers will be disappointed that current circumstances mean their learners are no longer having to ‘imagine’ quite so much, or gratified that so much of what they forecast can now be seen clearly playing out around us.

Also, I started the specialisation wanting to explore the futures of Learning and Neurodiversity, but unfolding events mean that I am now looking at the Future of Inequality (or being optimistic, the Future of Equality). So many of the tools I’ve learned are so suitable for this, as they require you to exercise empathy, and one is constantly reminded that the future is not fixed. We can choose to move towards the desirable futures by taking informed action, and away from the undesirable ones by acting to prevent them.

I cannot recommend these courses highly enough. McGonigal is an inspiring instructor, whose passion for her work shines through every video. The tools themselves are easily and immediately applicable to work and life. Although this learning is about the future, the skills it teaches are applicable immediately, leading to increased autonomy and renewed optimism about what is to come. Access this specialisation at https://www.coursera.org/specializations/futures-thinking

The post Review – Coursera’s Futures Thinking Specialisation first appeared on Ludogogy.