CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for ‘Staying the Course’ with Claire Hamshire
“I'm Claire Hamshire, I'm a Senior Learning and Teaching Fellow in the faculty of Health, Psychology and Social Care. As well as my teaching role, I have a learning and teaching role, so I support learning and teaching across the faculty with a number of different partners, particularly technology enhanced learning and games-based learning.
Games-based learning has a number of different definitions and I think, just to summarise for me, it is about using games within my teaching to promote learning. So, some people call them educational games, but really it is about the use of games to facilitate particularly learning outcomes and particular aims and objectives.
'Staying the Course' is a board game with a companion website and it is also an online game as well. Like all board games, the goal is to the first to finish and it follows a pathway around a board, which is a series of multi-coloured squares, four colours. The graphics of the game follow the course of an academic year and they appear in a sequence.And students move around and as they land of squares, whatever colour they land on they pick up the corresponding card sets. Most importantly, because the game is about making students aware of university services, at each of the four corners there is a service students really should be aware of. So, you have a library section, we have a Moodle online learning area, so student hub section.We have also got the Student Union advice section and the fourth section is Student Support services. So, obviously, the services students pick up like financial services and where they can go for help or support with a range of different problems.
Basically, the game was constructed from a research project. That research project, not surprisingly, was called ‘Staying the Course’, and that was an NHS North West funded project at all the universities where they had students in the Northwest. We collected stories and experiences from almost 1200 students, staff and Students Union staff, and then the recurring themes that came out of that we turned into the questions and the themes that ran through the cards. And so, the whole purpose of ‘Staying the Course’ is to give students an understanding when they start university about what it is like to be here. So, it gives them advice and direction towards academic support, social support, for some students we have a card set about placements, and then there is another card set about finance. And then, as with all good games, there is an element of chance so we have a 'take a chance' set of playing cards. So, the students get the idea that even though they might be working hard, random good things and bad things happen to all people, so, hopefully it gives them a heads up on that.
I developed the game quite by chance, actually. I had finished the research project and I was havinga meeting with the Student Union Team at MMU. It was about supporting student’s transition into university and why they leave, and I thought it would be interesting thing for them. So, we had a meeting, and they were very positive and they said ‘this is great, it is a great research report and you'll get some nice paper out of it, but how will you make a difference to students lives and what can you use this data for to actually help students on a daily basis?’ Which I think was a very important question! So, I will credit Paul Norman for that, the membership officer. I went away and thought about it and I realised… I think I had been watching something on TV and I just thought, these are stories and stories are hugely important and stories are about sharing experiences. And I thought one of the best ways to share the students stories was to use them within a games.Sowe did. We took the themes that came out of the data analysis.
I think ultimately what had come out the research was that students need both social integration and academic integration, and taking those two things, we built lots of information within the cards, but games are social, and one thing students said to us about when they came to university, they don't always like just sitting in a lecture theatre.They don't just want to be somebody who is sat listening and so they love interaction. And so the notion of a game is it is played with students up to about small groups of six and whilst they play the games, they get to have conversations about what could essentially be quite difficult subjects like financialdifficulties, or relationship problems or how to sort out when you’ve failed an assessment.
One of the things I like is this notion of a ‘magic circle of games play’. So, you are the playing piece so it is OK because these bad things or these difficult things are happening to the playing piece not particularly to you. So, it is nice to have the conversations which can be quite difficult in this sort of safe environment of game play.
We always play it in the first week of term and this year we played it on the first day. So, the students had been at university since 9 o'clock and then we run the session half way through the afternoon. I like to try and make the session as comfortable as possible. I do a quick presentation but ultimately, the games are already set up, so they come in and they know they are going to be doing something that is maybe a little but more interesting than being talked at. I lay the games out and I always provide sweets because I always think chocolate is important as well!
Two things are important about the game. […]At the end of that game, if they have not met anyone else yet, they know that they have sat with five people, and they know the names of that small group of people.And, actually, the aim of the session really is for them to understand a little bit more about how the university works, but also hopefully to have a conversation and introduced themselves, and therefore they leave knowing that they've chatted to a few people. Some of the questions are hopefully deliberately humorous and there is uproar and laughter sometimes and the notion is if they leave with that, that is great. It is their first day! AndI think that is a hugely important part of trying to develop some social connections on the first day.
The other thing we do do as well, because a lot of the questions are actually about university systems, they actually won't know all the answers.So if anybody comes across a card that they don't understand, what we let them do is set them aside and then I will go through any questions at the end. So, again, you are asking questions, but it is not you asking the question, it will just be me picking up the cards that have been troublesome.So again, they don't have to stand out from the crowd and ask a question which they may feel uncomfortable about asking.”