Gaming the Museum: Map to Get Lost Session Number 3, Teen Artist Project, 10-12th grade, 3 hour session, September 24, 2017 TAP students are learning about ways that gaming can structure experience and how mapping reveals spatial relationships. Engaging students as game designer, students become aware of the process of embodied learning that they engage in when they navigate space. Students work collaboratively to design a game for future visitors to play in the museum. Designing a game for others, they consider how we construct meaning through inhabiting space and creating connections. Students will design and create games for visitors to play, considering what they want the visitor to reflect upon. Students consider how to convey information, design and guide interactions and structure game play.
Key Concepts: We navigate using maps and directions. The built landscape teaches us how to move within it. Play opens up a space to observe, record and creatively respond to the environment. Maps can be directions to reach a destination as well as a record or narrative of an experience. Maps translate our mental understanding of space with our physical experience. Each person navigates and communicates spatial directions in unique ways. Gaming and mapping visualize the contingency and relationship within places. Games can provide opportunities to curate experiences, interactions and learning. Getting lost can help us to heighten our observation of our environment. We can learn about our environment by structuring a playful engagement within
Essential Question:
How do we navigate our world?
How do we communicate directions?
How do we map place? How do we map experience?
How do we construct meaning and narrate experiences within place?
What do we want to emphasize in the museum?
Where do we have access to and where can we not go?
How do we structure game play to foster creative mappings of space?
How do we design gaming devices (dice, coin toss, spinners) to curate interactions?
Lesson Objectives: The student will be able apply observations from previous sessions to design game instructions s to structure experience and navigation within the museum. The student will participate in designing a game for future visitors to play in the museum. Students will be able to identify the ways that geography might reveal unequal representation in the museum. Students will be able to articulate the objective of their game. Students will be able to design and craft their own gaming devices The student will be able to reflect on the ways that we use our senses to navigate by notating or mapping their experiences in the walking
Specific Art Content: Students will reflect on observation, using different strategies to elicit creative responses in their game designs. Students will observe the process of composing or designing instructions for action.
Artists/Artwork: Situationist International, Alan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Jane Bennett, Jorge Macchi, Janet Cardiff, Suzanne Lacy (Freeze Frame), Samara Smith (Chain Reaction).
Resources & Materials: Classroom at MOMFW Maps of the museum, museum district, fort worth, dfw, texas, united states, and the world iPads with Wi-Fi access and Google Docs (Excel) Mapping Clipboards Instructor computer with QGIS software & Excel Excel sheets on Google Docs linked to GIS Software Templates for dice, coin toss, spinners Cardboard, paper, markers, scissors, adhesive, index cards Instruction and Its Sequencing: Instructor will introduce students to the culminating activity and project: working collaboratively to design a game for museum visitors.
Introduction/Motivation: Present idea of games and getting lost. Give artist talk and previous versions of ROAM. Share artwork of Hamish Fulton, Francis Alÿs, Jorge Macchi, Yoko Ono, and John Cage as well as images of parkour, parades, protests, etc.
Instructor will ask students to discuss the parameters of getting lost. How is technology changing the ways that we navigate? How does technology function as a tool to facilitate mapping? How does technology hinder direct interaction with our environment?
Instructor will share examples of art games (Fluxus, Dada, Situationist, Samara Smith, Yoko Ono, John Cage). Instructor asks students to dicuss strategies for creating instructions that are open-ended. Instructor shares Yoko Ono’s Map to Get Lost.
Discuss meta data and data mining of information. Present the work of Trevor Paglen, Routes of Least Surveillance, and Mark Lombardi. Data Mining is used by marketers to track consumer behavior and to map invisible digital networked spaces. Introduce students to the idea that data collection of personal, location information and behavior is shared and sold. How can geographic information be used by artists to make invisible relationships more visible?
Instructor presents ideas of New Materialism – ask students to discuss attraction to objects, relationships between agents and agency. Students consider examples from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. Discussion question: Can we map our attraction to thingness?
Guided Practice
Instructor will provide an overview of all the activities in the preceding lessons using images from student examples and activities.
Instructor will guide students in creating imaginary maps in groups of three. Instructor will demonstrate the Yoko Ono activity using the classroom as an example. Students are shown examples of alternative mappings – Australian aboriginal paintings, Situationist International map collages, Jorge Macchi sculptural maps.
Instructor demonstrates different types of game devices (dice, coin toss, spinner, board games. Students discuss and consider possibilities for creating variations of customized game devices using templates for multiple sides of dice, coin toss, or spinners to structure game play.
Students brainstorm creative ways to structure game play.
Students work in groups of two to test game devices’ design. Students create prototypes to test and then redesign or recraft the form.
Students regroup to share their designs and ideas. The class brainstorms methods for game delivery, game structure, and an overarching theme and intent for the game.
Students discuss their reactions to the works they have seen and consider their goals for their audience. Using a white board to map ideas.
Students will work as a class to design and discuss the general game delivery, structure and intent of the game. If the students are struggling to come to a general consensus as a group but a few different ideas have taken shape, allow students to work towards different game versions with an eye toward self-organization.
Independent Practice
Individual prompts will be designed by teams of two students. Each team will create two Direction prompts and two Capture prompts. Each team will select works on view in the collection that was already mapped with metadata from Session 2. Students teams will identify an effective mapping or capture technique for the work of art in question. Students will identify features that they hope the Capture prompt will encourage players to observe.
Working in pairs, student teams will trade prompts with other teams to practice the efficacy of the prompt. Students will take turns notating each movement and recording the experience, look and feeling of the interaction they are trying to foster.
Students will return to the classroom and discuss the ways that they followed or didn’t follow the directions.
Students will share their notations from their trips and compare them to the directions they followed.
For each prompt and interaction, student teams will enter the information for each interaction place in the Place Log. Many places may also be in the Journey Log created in Session 1.
Students reconvene to discuss and share their prompts. Students discuss and create the delivery system for the game considering a delivery system that activates the museum space. For example, students could use museum didactics to call attention to interaction points or consider a delivery system that works like a scavenger hunt or book? How will students alert museum goers to their game?
Students continue to work at refining their game structures to create a cohesive and smooth functioning experience.
Closure
Students convene to discuss their game and possible extension for it.
Students reflect on the ways that their understanding of games have changed. Students discuss the ways that they think games can work to facilitate or hinder experiences in the museum.
Formative Evaluation Instructor will use the guided and independent practice time to assess student comprehension and application. Depending on performance, Instructor will slow or speed up demonstration and practice Classroom Management Procedures
This session is experimental and driven by student collaboration and engagement.
If progress is hindered, instructors will need to adapt the activity to work with student’s participation level.
If more structure is needed, teacher can implement game activity to create collaborative books based off of previous ROAM Lesson Plan titled Wander Walking.
Summative Assessment and Evaluation: Summative assessment is based on the games they create, participation in activity and reflection during discussion.
Interdisciplinary Connections: History, Architecture, Science, Political Science, GIS, Art History
References:
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