What is Let's Play? ESTABLISHED 2022
We use board games and create opportunities to help others learn and teach better via the experiential medium of games!
Conceived by Eric Rapos and Peter Jamieson in the spring of 2022, and with the initial support of Miami University's Center of Teaching Excellence the inaugural Faculty Learning Community Let's Play: Improved Instruction through Re-Experiencing Learning using Tabletop Games was created with the idea that board games would allow educators to experience role reversal and remind themselves what it is like to be a beginner and learner again. This web presence provides information on what and how we are continuing this work.
"The goal of that FLC is to use the medium of board games to elicit discussion of teaching experiences and allow participants to feel those experiences first-hand in a shortened amount of time." Rapos and Jamieson FLC Proposal, 2021
We maintain this web resource to allow others to see what we have been doing and to provide a medium for interested people to contact us about using our workshop ideas either via us or using our material to facilitate similar workshops in all sorts of spaces. We believe many of the ideas in this work will help a range of individuals become better learners and teachers. Teaching and learning are fundamental skills that we all should improve on. What's better than improving valuable life skills with the joy of playing a game!!!
We continue to inquire into this idea. Currently, our facilitating group consists of: Peter Jamieson, Eric Rapos, and Karen Davis with many others involved as participants in our workshops and research.
What if we want to do a "Let's Play" at our business or institution?
We would be happy to discuss what we can share or help organize for workshops.
Contact us via email -> jamiespa (at) miamioh (dot) edu AND Eric (dot) Rapos (at) ontariotechu (dot) ca AND davisk4 (at) miamiog (dot) edu. We are highly interested in propagating these ideas, but we are also interested in visiting and talking to all ranges of people with respect to theses ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.
The Research behind the Idea
As we are attempting to make this approach a community, and we are academic researchers, the notion of research is tightly linked to most of our work. For this reason, we are asking questions and trying to validate the benefit of games to improve teaching. Here we provide some quick links to our leading research publications and talks with citation information.
Publications
- WIP - Let's Play - Improving our Teaching by Reversing Roles and Being a Learner with Board Games presented at ASEE 2023 in Baltimore, MD
Acknowledgements for Support
Who makes this possible?
This idea takes support, and we would like to thank the following for helping get this work off the ground:
- The Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council supported an 2024-25 FLC run at Ontario Tech
- Miami's College of Engineering and Computing - Our Dean - 2023-24 - provides support to run Faculty Development in the College
- Miami University's Center of Teaching Excellence who funded the initial 2022-23 FLC including a budget to acquire games, facilitate space, and feed our discussions. They also supported our 2024-25 FLC and provided us with a space to present our ideas at the Lilly Conference.
- JS Bragg provided ideas and experience from his course at Miami on EDL 290T - Tabletop Leadership
