Week 10, 2012
Joensuu, Finland

One motivator that impulses me to be researching in games for learning is: I love to learn and I get bored in lectures. Actually, I confess: I am not a good student even though I am very well trained to be one. 😉

However, last year someone told me that it is time for me to share something of what I have learned. Additionally, I want to do it. So, the idea to give a lecture started to emerged. Today, it is a reality, and…… wowow! Teaching is VERY challenging!!!!

The first lecture of my game design course was yesterday, March 7, 2012 (I should remember that day). I have a chance to hear about some of the participants before the actual course started, because I requested them to email me to hear their motives to join the course. From my perspective it is an interesting group of people and VERY diverse.

The first day I gave the introduction to the course with some of my background. Then the real lecture started by introducing some history of games. I based myself on the work of Huizinga and Callois.

Today I briefly gave an insight of design thinking by Cross and Verganti. Latter I focus on games as dynamic systems of interaction, so after a brief engineering explanation of what systems are I focus my efforts on game mechanics. I used a taxonomy of game mechanics from Schell.

Honestly my feeling is: even that I am putting my best effort on preparing the lectures, I am not making justice to transmit the work of those thinkers…. Undoubtedly, I need more practice. I had been nervous, specially because I am not used to be on stage. 

The course participants are many, so the ideas that I had for an interactive lecture cannot work as I thought. In addition we have the long distance connection with Kuopio.….. If someone knows me, yes I am pushing for new ideas 😉 the technology has been very reliable so I hope it continues like this next week, because I am ready to have some fun 😉

Yes, I cannot avoid to be myself. I will keep on teaching, but maybe we can try new  methods 🙂 After the first exercise day (Monday in Joensuu and Tuesday in Kuopio), maybe the conditions for a more interactive type of lecture will emerged…. let’s see 🙂

Meanwhile a photo taken by Heikki Immonen from the very first day of the course.

my first day sharing a bit of what I have been learning