Community of Practice: Game Design club
I am amazed by the gains that my school-based game design club has made over the past term. Originally it was meant to be a once-a-week lunchtime activity – however the group of year 8 boys has been coming to the computer lab every day. I see this group as a perfect example of a community of practice where expertise is shared and each student learns their role to play in the game design project. The boys have been creating models and maps in Sketchup then importing them into Unity. The students have assumed roles such as project manager, modeler, coder, marketer etc and they seem to be intent by having a prototype game finished by the end of the school holidays – I can’t wait to see it! In any learning environment, there are different levels of expertise amongst the participants, which means that “newcomers” on the periphery of a learning group might be able to learn from more experienced, central “oldtimers” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In my mind, learning is inseparable from the social environment in which it takes place. Lave (1991) proposed that learning results naturally when students become participating members of a community of practice, so I would posit that high levels of student engagement, nurtured in the right environment, would result in a high levels of learning transfer. Game design has earned its place in higher education courses and I am happy to teach game design principles to my high school club. I am also very interested in the importance of identity formation in project-based learning. According to Lave (1992) learning “is a process of coming to be, of, forging identities of activity in the world” (p3) – and I would like to explore this idea further.
