Imagine you are a second year Physics student, you are attending Quantum Mechanics (QM), but the lectures just do not get to you (without blaming the quality of the teacher!). The way you want to learn QM is by discussing the content of the book with fellow students and show the teacher, through a presentation, that you have understood the weird, but beautiful concepts of QM. After this, your objective is to learn to apply these concepts, but perhaps via an different path, but how?

This exactly what the game “Flipping the Course” will be about.

We want to build a platform that will enable students to achieve the learning goals of any course in the way they seem fit. In other words, the end goal (the learning objectives of the course) is set, but how you attain these is up to you. We try to achieve this by creating a platform where student pick education- and examination modules to their own preferences. The education modules (such as tutorials, lectures or books) are merely an investment by the student in his knowledge and will therefore only “cost” the student money. Next to this there are the examination modules (like an exam or a project) that will also require an investment from the student, but will also enable the student to earn money if successfully completed. By iteratively selecting different modules the student is able to complete an entire course, but now in his (or her) way.

After the Game Jam I decided that I wanted to build this game. Hence I submitted a project proposal to the RUG and in August I heard my project was accepted! But now what? I had to find someone who was crazy enough to support it. The person I found was the head of Science Linx, Bart van de Laar. Who offered me a place to experiment, free of teachers and formal restrictions of the education systems, which was at the 'voorlichting'. At first this might not seem at the most logical place to start a pilot, but it offers an environment in which the first prototype can be build without having to deal with teachers and/or examination committees. And a prototype is much needed when you want to convince teacher that what you have build works and that they should try it!

So now that the projected was embedded it was time start to building it, but how do you do it? First you Google 'project management' , then 'Game design' and try to read and learn everything you can on those subjects. After that you get a group of enthusiastic students together (“project group”) and start thinking about what exactly what you want to make. Which is actually much more difficult than you think. Since you will immediately start by brainstorming and throwing out wild creative ideas, but before you know it you are lost. Luckily this how most project evolve and is there a good remedy for it; focus.

This is the stage I am at now.

Meaning that over the last week the project started to converge, resulting in putting the ideas into practice (with a lot of them fail) and working towards the first prototype (version 0.1). Which will be a very simple and basic board game that can be played by four people. To put things in perspective; we want the final product (ready in October) to be a rather complex free-market simulation in a digital environment that can be played by approximately 50 high school students.

As you can see we need to take a lot of steps in order to achieve this, but I am confident that we will manage, just because it is a loads of fun!!

Thank you for reading,

(P.S. If you want to know more you can contact me via bramlap@gmail.com)