I spent this afternoon at work in what is perhaps the most unusual manner of any afternoon that I have spent at work, in a room overlooking Plymouth Sound with 60-70 first year students all playing board games. These students are one week into their four week ‘Our Ocean Planet’ module in which they design and present an artifact to communicate a marine science-related issue. Artifacts can include posters, videos, TED-style talks, campaigns, blogs and …. board games. So, the idea of the session today was for the students to spend 2-3 hours playing one or more games in their groups, evaluating their experiences and having a think about what works well and what doesn’t. Alongside this of course, they were working together as a team and getting to know each other.
It was a really interesting experience to watch them at work. Groups of (mostly) four students (mostly aged 19-20) clustered on individual tables (per group) chatting away, reading rules, setting up, playing games through – thoroughly social, thoroughly engaged in their activity, clearly treating the session seriously and getting something out of it. This, on a Friday afternoon when the sun was shining outside and when no-one would actually have picked them up on not being there.
My role, along with that of the other tutors present was to help them along, to encourage, to join in, to pose questions about what they were doing.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing of all was the fact that for most of the session, certainly for the first hour or so and for some groups as much as three hours, there was almost none of the continual interaction with smartphones that is so prevalent everywhere these days. For a few tens of minutes, these students put down their tech and became immersed in cardboard pieces, counters, rule booklets etc. and, critically, each other. They became truly social animals and it was blindingly obvious that they enjoyed it.
I expect that on leaving the session most slipped almost immediately back into their internet-connected, social network-driven existences, but I do I hope that the little glimpse of real reality that I saw in action this afternoon continues to blossom in their lives.
Tim O'Hare 