I developed Fire Tag back when I worked for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Being a product of the National Park Service, Fire Tag is firmly in the public domain. With this project, my goal was to create a fast, fun, and interesting activity for the 2012 Santa Monica Mountains Science Festival.

The good news is that 100+ kids enjoyed Fire Tag at the 2012 Science Festival. They didn’t learn quite as much as we’d hoped, but we’d always prioritized inspiration over information, so that was okay. On reflection, we found that the biggest obstacle to learning had nothing to do with the game design or the lesson design. Rather, it was our naïve logistics – we didn’t have enough people to organize waiting lines and play sessions. The resulting confusion made it hard to hold reflective discussions. However, the take home message from the day was that Fire Tag had lots of potential as a playful learning activity.

Unfortunately, after I left the NPS, Fire Tag got lost among the very many good ideas competing for very limited funds. This was a terrible shame, so I’ve updated the rules and materials, and published them online here.

As I expand the educational scope of Mindful Mammoth, I hope to begin using Fire Tag in some of our outreach programs with local groups. I also hope that other folks may find this game, and try it out with their kids or their friends. Maybe you will do this. I hope so!

– Tim

The Solar System is a vast and complex place, where every object has it’s own story, or even multiple stories. Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out how to even begin to learn about something so vast and complex. My suggestion: start with just one thing. Then learn one more thing. Then another. Eventually, you’ll find that you know quite a lot.

Each Solar System Dance card has a picture of an object, a fact about that object, and a suggested way to express that fact through dance. You shuffle the cards, hand them out to a bunch of people, then have them all orbit the ‘sun’ while dancing their object.

Last week, I roughed out 14 cards, enough for the 14 person Rocket Science class that I’m teaching. We tried it out, and it worked pretty well!

As always our focus remains on The Puzzle of Life, but it’s fun to think about other ideas, and useful to think about where we might go next, once the Puzzle is out. This is one possible ‘next.’

 

Last Saturday, we brought a bunch of activities to LAEEF 2016 (the Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair). The central activities revolved around The Puzzle of Life, and we encouraged visitors to make of it what they would – to find solutions, make their own pieces, or work on a coloring book. Some highlights:

A Family Connected by love!

When we talk about connections, most people immediately think of physical stuffs: food, water, air, and the like. So, I was wonderfully surprised when this woman sat down with her daughters, and began creating a Puzzle based on her family. She created a central ‘family’ piece, additional pieces for the various people in her family, and a final piece that represented the love that connected her family together. Which was great!

A Determined Puzzler

The Puzzle of Life is actually kinda difficult. Even with the harder pieces removed (omnivores, oak tree, rainbows), most people take quite a while to find a solution. Of course, we’re happy to help, but we’re also happy when people are so captivated by the Puzzle that they find their own way to the answer. This young man was one such person. He was obviously engaged and determined, so when I asked if I could take his picture, he said that I could, but not until he’d finished.

A Determined Artist

While some people were attracted by the challenge of the Puzzle, others wanted to express themselves. This young man sat down, and with nary a word, slowly and methodically produced a set of remarkably beautiful pieces. He then left as mysteriously as he arrived. I feel like there’s a story in his pieces, and while I don’t know what it is, I can imagine lots of great possibilities.

The Long Tail

One of the benefits of the World Wide Web is that it has something for everyone. There are blockbuster media thingums that appeal to big audiences, but there are also niche blogs and channels that serve niche needs, needs that would have gone unserved in the dark times before the Internet. Those many small niches are often known as the long tail.

Why do I bring this up? Because at last Saturday’s LAEEF, I feel like we caught the long tail. Most of the visitors seemed like they wanted to look around, but didn’t really want to engage. On the other hand, there were a smaller number of folks, perhaps forty, who really dug in to our activities, seemed to find them highly rewarding.

Those who did engage with the Puzzle did so in a wide variety of ways, confirming yet again that The Puzzle of Life is a wonderfully flexible learning tool. I’m really happy that we were able to help these people to engage their minds and hands in ways that they found rewarding.

Given that the Puzzle can serve such a wide range of interests, I would bet that there were many folks at LAEEF who would have enjoyed our activities, if only they’d had more confidence about what they’d be getting into, which is a marketing problem.

Marketing and image are things that we’ve always struggled with, but we’re slowly getting better. Last Saturday, we got some useful feedback from visitors, feedback that will help us to improve our presentation, and to have a bigger impact at future festivals. Specifically, we’ll add a few more tabletop signs, as well as some printed activity suggestions – one page cartoons suggesting Puzzle challenges and piece ideas. Together, these items should allow the more shy among our visitors to feel comfortable, confident that they can try out our activities without fear of pressure or marketing. We never pressure anyone for anything, but we totally understand that folks might be wary of unfun tactics, as we’ve been on the receiving end of those things ourselves.

Later gators.

 

 

Across ten days in February and March, we brought our Puzzle-based Systems and Ecosystems program to about 40 fourth and fifth graders in Burbank. A good time was had by all, and the school kindly allowed us to take some photos to share.

The main project in the Systems and Ecosystems program is The Puzzle of Me. Here, students use the ideas from The Puzzle of Life to create their own version of the Puzzle. The difference is that, in this version, the Puzzle is centered not on the sun – but on themselves. The first step of this project is to create a life map to show the many ways that you are connected to the world around you. This map serves as a blueprint for a Puzzle, showing both objects (which become tiles) and flows (which become the arrows between the tiles). We encourage students to think several steps out, and hope that they create life maps that show both direct and indirect relationships, and that show both tangibles (e.g. food) and intangibles (e.g. music, love, ideas).

After creating a map, the next step is to create a Puzzle piece that represents yourself. That piece has in-arrows and out-arrows to show how materials and ideas flow between you and your direct connections.

From this point, students then proceed onwards in a more open fasion, and create Puzzle pieces based on the most important bits of their lives, the bits that they identified in their Life Map.

One young girl was a huge fan of pugs. She originally wanted to make a Puzzle of Pug, rather than a Puzzle of herself. We talked for a bit, and we figured out that she could make a Puzzle of herself, but have pugs as high-importance direct connection. When she finished, I asked her if I could take a photo of her pug drawing. She said that I could, but only if I included her as well. I’m not sure if this was intended or not, but you can see that the out-arrow from the pug is pointed kinda towards her head, which is entirely fitting for a girl with pugs on the brain.

Another young girl drew a wonderfully colorful brain. I asked her what was going on, and she pointed to the other tile on the page, explaining how she would pass on her knowledge to her children. That made me super happy.

Overall, the program worked well for both grades. Most of the kids were highly-engaged for the entire program, which means we totally nailed our primary goal, and succeeded in creating a program which is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. The students also learned some great ideas about ecology, and more specifically, about the Yellowstone story and about trophic cascades.

Most students still struggled with the abstract concept of second- and third- (and beyond) connections. They know that they are connected to their friends, but often don’t think about the way that their friends are connected to *their* friends. They don’t think about the fact that friends-of-friends can be relevant, even if you never meet or hear of them. We could see this in their life maps, very few of which contained meaningful indirect connections, but we got some good feedback on how we can improve our presentation so as make this abstract idea more approachable.

This is, I believe, as it should be. Just as these kids learn about science from us, so do we learn about learning from them. The fact that we all know that we’re learning from each other creates an environment of mutual respect, and that mutual respect then allows us to have a productive learning environment.

Next up (probably tomorrow) stories from the 2016 Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair.

We’re getting prepared for the Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair, which will be held this Saturday at the Los Angeles County Arboretum. If you’re in the area, you should come!

As in past events, one of our activities will be making pieces for The Puzzle of Life. This time, we’ve got 400+ friendly foamboard shapes, custom-cut for us by the people at Up In Pieces. This means that eventgoers will have lots of blank spaces in which to exercise their intellect and imagination, after which they can take home their creations.

Again, if you’re in the area, you should come visit! There ought to be lots of great activities, both from us and from others.

It’s been a busy month-or-so, and I’m just a passable blogger – hence the long break since the last post. What’s been going on?

Systems and Ecosystems at The Sycamore School:

We brought our sparking new 5-part Puzzle-based activity series to the first and second grade students of The Sycamore School. The kids were thoroughly engaged by the activities, enjoying their time with The Puzzle of Life, the Yellowstone Story Coloringbook, and the opportunity to make a brand new Puzzle centered around their own lives.

As we expected, the whole systems-thinking deal was a struggle for such young kids, but it was a fun and useful struggle. Talking with the Sycamore team in our post-activity feedback session, everyone felt that the activities had helped to stretch the minds of these students, and that by exposing them to these ideas at such an early age, we were helping to build a foundation for lifelong learning.

You can find a short bit about our visit on the school’s blog here. They also wrote a very warm testimonial, and we’ve put a short excerpt on our website here.

Systems and Ecosystems at Roosevelt Elementary:

Building on our success with the young folks at The Sycamore School, we’ve been working with other schools around Los Angeles to share our work with them as well. Two weeks ago, we brought a more advanced version of the Systems and Ecosystems activities to some of the 5th graders at Roosevelt Elementary.

It went great, and I wish that we had some photos to share, but I don’t. That’s one of the tough parts of being an innovative educational startup. Putting children first means being extremely cautious about sharing information (especially photographs, and especially especially faces), which makes it hard to convey the imagination and excitement that goes on in our programs.

The Future

Next week, we’ll bring that same, advanced Systems and Ecosystems program to some of the 4th graders at Roosevelt Elementary.

Then, in two weeks, we’ll be sharing a whole bunch of things at the annual Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair (LAEEF). Cool beans!

 

Systems and Ecosystems at The Sycamore School:

I recently joined Chris Renshall and Joe Brogno of Cardboard Architects to talk about games, game design, and education. That podcast is now live, and available for free on the Web, iTunes, and more.

We talked about Fire and Flora, The Puzzle of Life, and Chris and Joe’s own experiences with board games in the classroom. Good times were had by all. If you’re interested in either games or education, you should give it a listen.

We’ve just published v1.00 of a thoughtful, detailed, and playful lesson plan aimed at students in first and second grade. It is now up on the web (here), and freely available for use. The plan details a series of five short activities that will help students to learn about systems and ecosystems through play.

While the activities are based around the ideas in The Puzzle of Life, only the first activity actually requires The Puzzle. Thus, if a classroom does not have access to the Puzzle, or does not wish to use the Puzzle, the latter four lessons in this lesson plan (which is most of it) will still serve as a great, free introduction to ecology and systems thinking.

The five hour-long activities go like this:

Day 1: Intro to The Puzzle of Life

Five minute intro lecture, explaining how the Puzzle uses arrows to model flows. Free Puzzle play. Free imaginative Puzzle piece construction.

Day 2: Intro to Systems

Mini-lecture on systems thinking. Tell of the story of wolves in Yellowstone, using the Puzzle of Life to illustrate. Color the Yellowstone Storybook.

Day 3: Begin Work on The Puzzle of Me

Introduce the idea of The Puzzle of Me. As a class, practice project tasks by creating a Puzzle around the life of the instructor or a famous person (ex: Katy Perry eats vegetables; vegetables come from farms; farms need water, sunlight, energy. Katy Perry creates music, joy, poop, etc.). Put students into working groups. As individuals, have students start work on the Puzzle of Me Project Workbook. Focus on the first page, where students map out their relationships / connections.

Day 4: Continue work on Puzzle of Me’s

Students continue working on their Puzzle of Me, with the help of instructor(s), and using the Project Workbook as scaffolding. Students should finish mapping their relationships early in the period, and spend most of the time creating Puzzle pieces based on the ideas described in their maps.

Day 5: Finish Puzzle of Me’s. Share student-made Puzzles. Reflect.

Students finish creating pieces for their Puzzle of Me. They probably won’t have time to create all the pieces that they’d imagined, but they should have a good dozen pieces each. Invite volunteers to share their concept maps, and some of their pieces, with the class. Summary lecture/discussion.

Every month, around the 10th, we send out thank-you gifts to our larger Patreon backers. Last month, one person commented that the envelopes weren’t real classy, and we ought to get something better. So, with the help of Marcus Bieth III (eponymous owner of Mark III graphic design), we have!

It’s a small thing, but fun. I’m particularly happy with the alignment of the mammoth on the back. When you seal the envelope, the top and bottom halves merge almost seamlessly.

This month’s backers will get a rewriteable tile from The Puzzle of Life. We use these in our outreach programs to allow our players to expand the Puzzle based on their own interests. Lions, tigers, unicorns, aliens – anything is possible.

A couple weeks ago, we brought The Puzzle of Life to two elementary school classrooms at Toluca Lake Elementary.

The Puzzle was a big hit with the 5th grade class of Dennis Hagen-Smith. After a brief intro, the kids worked together to solve the puzzle. You can see one group at work in the photo to the right. Once they got the hang of things, we gave them some blank pieces so that they could make their own pieces for the Puzzle.

Last week, we received a set of wondrously excited and encouraging thank-you’s from both the teacher and the class. Among other things, Dennis said that our visit was, “one of the finest educational presentations I’ve seen in my 25 years of teaching.” That’s a huge complement, coming as it does from a highly capable and inspiring teacher. We’ve posted some excerpts from the letters on the new Puzzle of Life testimonial page, here.

With funding being a constant challenge, it’s easy to get discouraged, but the times spent working with curious and excited kids (and adults) makes it all worthwhile.