‘Innov8ing’ with young people

At least one of our five finalists will be a young person or group of young people. We are working with a number of schools who are supporting groups of students to enter Innov8. The time commitment is around two hours.

The outline here on how to lead students through developing their ideas should be used alongside the registration pack so please make sure you have registered and looked through the pack prior to starting this with young people. This will only take you ten minutes.

Ideas for Innov8 do not have to be games but when working with young people on ideas it is advised that you concentrate on game ideas as young people will be able to quickly understand the context of the challenge they are being set. However, this is up to you.

Session 1 – Introduction to Innov8

Session 1 is all about getting students organized into teams and working on their ideas. By the end of the session they should have come up with an idea and be able to describe it and answer questions about it according to the questions in the brief section below.

Introduce Innov8 and tell students that at least one of the five finalists will get to pitch their idea at BETT and if they win they will potentially get to work with Pearson to turn their idea into reality.

Q&A starter

Draw a Venn diagram on the whiteboard with three sections – games for learning, smartphones/tables, open data – and lead a Q&A on what each of these mean:

Gaming in general: What kinds of games do people play? Online, handheld devices, phones, board games, role play and so on – get as many ideas out as possible.

Gaming for learning: Role play, strategy games, location based games, online and social gaming, board games, simulation based games – what do these mean and how can they be used to help us develop ideas and knowledge?

Smartphone/tables: What kind of scenarios can mobile technologies be used in and how can they help cereate new ways of learning? Think about field trips and the use of powerful connected devices with cameras, video and sound recording built in.

Open data and technology: What is a google map mashup and how many of these can you think of? Does anyone know what an API is or how these are used? What other examples of open data can you think of?

Team activity

Working in groups of 4 or 5,  students need to come up with a great idea for a learning game that can either use open data or that uses smartphones/tables to do things you can’t do on a desktop or laptop computer.

Introduce the final presentation format so they know where they need to get to – this is a short description of their idea, a long description (300 words max), up to 3 images each with a short description and a biog telling us who they are.

Brainstorm the brief

Teams should now start brainstorming ideas for their games and write up answers to the following questions that make up their brief:

What is the learning objective for the game?

What kind of game is it?

How will the game work and what is the narrative for the game?

How will it help you learn?

How will it use either smartphones/tablets or open data or technology?

Plenary

Get the teams to present their ideas to each other and point out where teams are doing well through being clear on how their ideas answer to the brief.

Session 2 – preparing the presentation

This session is all about getting their ideas ready to be submitted. The team should assign responsibility to each member:

1. Once they have revisited the idea as a group, one team member should write up the idea

2. Game walk through/functional wireframe – another team member should crate a storyboard or a flow diagram that illustrates how the game will work and provide an illustration of the game interaction works with users throughout the game. This will allow the Innov8 panel to gain an idea of how your game will work as it is being played.

3. Look and feel mood board – using the internet for inspiration, another team member should work on what the game feels like. Will it include a lot of text and images? Will it include sound and video? Will it look real or like a cartoon? Teams should create a mood board that captures the style of their game idea. Create a montage of images that helps the Innov8 panel understand what you game feels like. Think about who it is for and the style that is best suited to the audience. You could include fonts, colours and design styles.

4. Interface design/design wireframe – this is a sketch of how different parts of the game will be presented to users – will it have a large screen and info panels, a map or buttons to open instructions and help? Create a basic diagram that helps the Innov8 panel understand how your game will be presented to the user.

Pulling it all together

To finish off, the long written description and images complete with descriptions should be put into a single document. Teams should add a short descrioption at the top of the document and give their game a name if they haven’t already done so. They also need to write a biog for their team. They could give themselves a team name for this and then give their actual names, their school name and location and year group.

Submitting the completed ideas

We recommend that a teacher or other adult working at the school email all the ideas as separate attachments in a single email. Make it clear in your email that these are ideas from teams of students.

Good luck!