Larping your way to engagement: Designing educational larps for library training and information literacy

Short Session Description: 

Educational larping has been found to "increase a student’s intrinsic motivation, enjoyment of school topics such as science, and perceived competence”¹. Because of studies like this, live action role-playing (larping) has seen an increase in use within education in the last few years. However, as many of these larps are never published, librarians who are interested in bringing such techniques into their staff training or instruction sessions have little guidance. In this workshop, award winning educational larp designers Jason Morningstar and Jessica Hammer, along with Kate Hill, a librarian larp designer, will guide attendees through the process of designing a larp based on the attendees own learning objectives.

Session Format and Style: Skill Workshop/ Play Session

Takeaways:

At the end of this workshop, participants will understand how larp has been used in other educational settings, the basics of developing one’s own larp and how to match larp design to learning objectives. Every participant will leave with an outline of their very own larp and will be paired up with one of the workshop designers (there will eventually be more than those listed below!), who will act as a larp coach, to help them continue the process after they go back to their own library.

Organization:

The three main designers of this (who have already agreed to present) are:

Jason Morningstar is probably one of the best-known game designers in the United States. If you have played Fiasco, the best-selling indie RPG, you have played one of Jason’s games. Jason is the lead designer at Bully Pulpit games, the designer of not only Fiasco, but games that focus on education and history, such as Night Witches, a game that teaches about the lives of Russian female fighter pilots in World War II. Jason also designs larps and experiences for staff training all over the world, including Google. In addition to all of this, Jason has his MLIS from UNC Chapel Hill!

Jessica Hammer is a professor of Learning Science at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, where she specialized in using role-playing games to improve student comprehension and engagement. She also is the co-designer of the game Rossentrasse, a game that teaches about the experience of the civil disobedience among Jewish communities in Germany in the lead up to World War II. It was a finalist for best Non-Digital Game at the educational game conference Meaningful Play.

Kate Hill is the electronic resources librarian at UNC Greensboro. In her other life, she designs larps and is a larp community organizer based out of Durham North Carolina. She has developed educational larps to help librarians with public speaking and is the editor of an anthology of larps designed to teach about resistance movements throughout history.

Contact Information:

Kate Hill

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Kmhill6@uncg.edu

1. Chen, Sande (2016) “The World According to Edu-larps: The Analog Learning Games”. Games and Learning. https://www.gamesandlearning.org/2016/02/18/the-world-according-to-edu-larps-the-analog-learning-games/