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Work in Progress: Let's Play — Improving Our Teaching by Reversing Roles and Being a Learner with Board Games

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Faculty Development Division (FDD) Technical Session 9

Tagged Division

Faculty Development Division (FDD)

Page Count

7

DOI

10.18260/1-2--44307

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/44307

Download Count

95

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Paper Authors

biography

Peter Jamieson Miami University

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Dr. Jamieson is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Miami University. His research focuses on Education, Games, and FPGAs.

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biography

Eric James Rapos Miami University

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Dr. Eric Rapos is an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at Miami University, specializing in research in tool and interface design aimed at collaboration and user interaction. Recent projects have involved virtual reality, voice interfaces, and sketch recognition, all aimed at collaborative software modeling. He also is actively researching the use of games in teaching and faculty development, and is an avid tabletop gamer in his spare time.

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Nathaniel Bryan

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Abstract

The focus of this work-in-progress (WIP) paper is on the creation and evaluation of a faculty development activity to improve teaching through reflection and empathy. Our intervention takes the form of a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) where staff and faculty participants have frequent opportunities to experience role reversal through being a learner again. Participants become active learners by playing modern board games that help them remember the experience of being a learner once again. By choosing different types and styles of games we are able to provide a space for the participants to discuss broader teaching practices such as the importance of technical vocabulary, scaffolding ideas as we teach them, and the benefits of student-centered learning approaches. Another critical aspect of this intervention is that we hope to use role reversal to remind teachers how hard it is to learn by giving the teacher more empathy for the learner.

In this paper, we describe our FLC organization, which we are conducting over the 2022-23 academic year with 9 participants and 2 facilitators. We begin by briefly describing the FLC meetings completed and planned for this time frame, followed by a detailed description of how we are investigating the impacts of this intervention. We will present the design of our qualitative study which includes evaluating participant feedback. We are collecting feedback within each session, as well as over the complete experience. Additionally, we plan to collect data from our participants’ students in their Spring semester classes to examine potential impacts made by our members’ application of concepts gained through the experiences of the FLC. We conclude by describing our hypothesized expectations for this work and look forward to feedback from the community on these efforts.

This work is a - Work-in-Progress (WIP) Paper, Poster Presentation (Noting, we believe that this would be an excellent Mini-demonstration if the organizers would like this, in that we could have a mini-session so that the audience could experience a short board game to understand the experience and we could as a group discuss it.)

Jamieson, P., & Rapos, E. J., & Bryan, N. (2023, June), Work in Progress: Let's Play — Improving Our Teaching by Reversing Roles and Being a Learner with Board Games Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44307

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