Monday, April 8, 2024

GAMA Expo 2024 and KySTE 2024

As I previewed in a previous entry, I attended and presented at two conferences in March, but I've been busy since then and haven't taken the time to write a reflection on what I saw and encountered! So in today's entry, I'll share some highlights.  

GAMA Expo

The international GAMA Expo was at the recently renovated Kentucky International Convention Center, the first of its three scheduled years in Louisville.  I attended the day of my own presentation and the following day.  Not surprisingly as it is mainly a closed-to-the-public industry trade show, the majority of sessions involved game publisher announcements, or ways for gameshop owners to improve their sales, marketing, community partnerships, and so on.  In terms of help for education, it was mainly found on the exhibition floor where I walked the booths of various vendors and game publishers and discovered resources such as the following:

  • Academy Games have several historic board games, such as the 878 Vikings: Conquest of England and One Small Step (a "Space Race" simulation).  From a classroom perspective, I was heartened to see many of them advertised as requiring "15+" number of players.  Some of their games also offer a companion teacher's guide for sale, such as the Colonial Trilogy (first, second, and third) and Freedom: The Underground Railroad.  It was this last game in particular that compelled me to initiate a long talk with Uwe Eickert, Freedom's designer.  Players are abolitionists helping enslaved people escape to the North (meaning it avoids the problematic issues of players enacting the role of an oppressor or the oppressed), and as Uwe walked through the game's mechanics, "Freedom" seemed conscientiously honest in how it approaches, as Academy's catalog describes it, the "horrors and heroism" of the topic.
  • Beach House RPGs has Tim Beach as a Director, who wrote second edition D&D modules and expansion materials in the 1990's.   Tim wanted to design a TTRPG ruleset that has a much easier entry point for a beginning player, and the result is Start Here.  While the starter set has a default fantasy setting, other books include resources for sci-fi and other genres.  Start Here could offer teachers a great opportunity to adapt a simple, flexible game mechanic for their classrooms!  Materials will begin shipping in June 2024. For more information on acquiring the game, click here.
  • Liftoff 2.0: The Epic Space Race Simulation is a well-reviewed board game that has been around for over three decades (the first edition came out in 1989).  It is grounded in real science content and historical accuracy, and offers enough roles for several teams of students to simulate the American and Soviet Union's race to the moon.  According to its designer Fritz Bronner, Liftoff has been used in many classrooms.  However, be warned: perhaps fittingly for its realistic take on managing a space program, the game seemed complicated with lots of token pieces, tables of outcomes, and rules.
  • I talked with Andy Hand and Mike Johnson from Limitless Adventures.  They are huge fans of educators, and their "Limitless Encounters" card sets based on D&D fifth edition rules (such as The Blood Queen's Defiance, which Hand and Johnson were kind enough to gift me to review) offer an opportunity for students of an extracurricular club to "self-DM" a Dungeons & Dragons adventure.  Teachers might also use these card sets as inspiration on how to automate their own classroom academic TTRPG modules.
  • I briefly spoke with Matthew Orr from Wet Ink Games.  Wet Ink is a local Kentucky game publisher, and it's exciting to know the Bluegrass has such designers in its own backyard!


KySTE 2024

After missing the conference in 2023, I was excited to make it back to KySTE, as it returned to the Kentucky International Convention Center after years at the Galt House.  Ironically, I presented in the same lower level room as I had at GAMA the week prior!

The attendees for my KySTE 2024 session.

Like GAMA, I attended KySTE on the day of my own session as well as the following day.  While there were several standout sessions, I'll spotlight three.

In my last entry, I wrote about Chad Collins and his digitally infused, game-based design of the Spencer County Middle School "Academy Team" elective.  Chad and Michelle Gross offered an expansive and detailed explanation of that course with their session "Play to Learn: Building a Class with Game-Based Design."  Plus, they gave away what was easily the best swag I encountered at KySTE: bags with a d20 die and example "treasure cards" they use in their classes!


Keith Barnes, a Bullitt County digital learning coach, gave a thought-provoking presentation imploring us to "Go Beyond Using AI like a Magic 8 Ball."   He reminded us that the students should do the thinking even as the AI may do the "work."  In particular, the session centered on an intriguing perspective from a white paper by Drs. Ethan and Lilach Mollick that posited seven approaches for using artificial intelligence with students, with AI as Mentor, Tutor, Coach, Teammate, Student, Simulator, and/or Tool. 


William King (Director of Technology) and Megan Marcum (Digital Learning Coach) from Bowling Green Independent district used the running metaphor of space missions to describe their PD facilitation of a digital learning teacher cohort in their session "Teach2Transform, a Field Guide to Building Better PD."  Initially, William and Megan shared that only 47% of BGI staff thought the relevance of their PD was "very good" or "good," with relevance and continuity cited as the biggest barriers to BGI PD being effective.  With these survey results in mind, William and Megan found success by creating a cohort meeting six half-days throughout the year during the school day, with the focus being succinctly summarized as giving teachers "time, resources, space, and help."  Stipends were given for teachers to spend on resources for their classroom, although interestingly, they found stipends were not a primary motivational driver for the cohort.  The participants' own personal goals were paramount, as well as William and Megan using high quality frameworks for contextualizing the digital learning (in this example, it was the McLeod/Graber "4 Shifts" and Hebern/Corippo's EduProtocols). 

I'll end my highlights of KySTE 2024 with a great overview video, shot and edited (as always!) by STLP student engineers who also were the "IT help desk" throughout the conference:


Again, while these nearly back-to-back conferences made for a very busy March, I was glad for the opportunity to learn from so many people from so many places.

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