A book chapter exploring a drama process - (Follow up to Digital Braves)

Intro

The first section examines the impact of a process drama with an aim to establish and nurture community practice. It highlights the value of introducing almost-real processes, near authentic tools and the possibility of learners developing learning identities within a drama frame.

The drama process is an example of an introduced cultural tool. The process acts as wrapper to several supporting techniques. the side missions to and to sanction different approaches, the imagined audience encourages reflection and semi-authentic approaches.

It is the most advanced tools of a range that was put into place to create a space suitable for creativity, collaboration and self expression in a wider pedagogy.

Re-examining barriers and tensions associated with cultural factors

• social and cultural barriers and other more technical obstacles.

Barriers and tensions associated with authenticity of audience -

Learners may not find coding a project a motivating project if it is only a private activity with no authentic audience

Making for peers has value but can be amplified and scoped using a fictional or controlled external audience often via scenarios.

Play Testing - each lesson can help with short term motivation of having a game product ready for others to play. Showcase events help longer-term motivation towards and aid prioritisation as learners near the end of their project.

The process of starting with a broken but playable template game allowed learners to be able to share their game with others from the start of the coding process.

As a designer I identified this tactic as a way to address learner disengagement if game coding is taught from scratch via a step by step instructions from first principles, especially in younger ages.

Similarly, in my journal notes, I reflect on the difficulty of interrupting the flow of making activities once they are underway. I thus began avoiding stopping making to share points to the whole class and avoid demonstrating key concepts on the screen.

Barriers of identity hardcore coding & dysfunctional group work

In chapter 4 I surfaced the conflict experiences by participants in phase one of the process where an alienation from the culture of coding prevented participation. While this was articulated clearly by just one family, this aligns with the thread of the LR exploring barriers to participation in the the culture of coding. In this section I explore the emerging tensions / barriers in more depth (and responses) to provide context for the following chapters sections. NOTE - REALLY HERE? IS THERE A BETTER PLACE? CH.4?

NOTE - MENTION SOURCE OF FAMILY FROM THE DIGITAL BRAVES ACTIVITY? While speculative, it may be of significance that this family had also attended an open workshop for families before this programme which used drama processes to begin to explore issues of digital tracking and give hands on coding experiences. It is possible that it was this combination of tech and non-tech activities which gave them the confidence to attend a program based around coding. When the family withdrew, in my journal notes I reflected that the they shared of alienation from the group process occurred in a session where, due to a sense of urgency to complete games, I had omitted drama-based warm up activities. Instead as participant entered I began to support to help some participants debug some pressing code errors.

Gulfs between desires and reality

While members of this family were able to engage in planing via sketching on paper and in creating pixel art, they were reliant on others to implement code changes. This was in part due to improvised group roles.

The freedom of choice and imagination allowed by designing on paper and via pixel art created compounding tensions. One crisis point involved a frustration of a child who was not able to implement a feature they wanted to add to the game next:

A 3d bee design of one participant which happened when there was no framework.

While personal expression can facilitates engagement and motivation it can lead to conflict if desired changes are not realistic.

In order to accelerate the process of making a game to fit into contextual expectations of an acceptable project timeframe, I pre-chose the genre of game to be made as a two dimensional (2D) platformer game.

The incident lead me to greater reflection on ongoing measures needed to prevent participant drop out for due to cultural tensions and negative affect to the working community. These include:

• An awareness of the danger that those more confident in coding create more involved code problems that need more facilitator time, potentially making others feel less valued.
• A concern for the fragility of learners positive affect towards the group game making process and thus the need for initial playful starting and closing activities to be continued beyond initial sessions.
• The value of a stronger buy-in by participants, ideally a greater commitment to the collective making process balanced with the need for low pressure (avoiding a negative sense of obligation).

Narrative summary of conflict - TRANSITION TO DRAMA SCENARIO

The conflict comprised of compounding factors and resulted in a lack of desire to complete coding activities before fully engaging with them.

In the initial stages some families struggled to reconcile the obstacles presented but their active participation in warm up games shows ….

While many families talked of the challenge of coding, one family in particular were s In reflection on the session that ended their participation

INSERT SOME ANALYSIS HERE BASED ON AGENCY AND AFFORDENCES OFFERED

Exploring the impact of a drama processes

The introduction of a drama process was introduced in response to a the barriers to participation caused by not identifying with the culture of coding or gaming. This section describes the addition ot the intervention and explores its value as a pedagogical tool to seed game coding practices and to develop learner agency.

Vignette 4.1.a - Introducing a drama process

The participants have entered the room and chosen a laptop to work on. Some of the children play web-based games or reviewing the games that they have made previously. The session progresses with a warm-up game which includes many false starts, changes of rules, development of tactics, appeals to be serious, full throated laughter and many restarts and which ends in good hearted failure. The transcript below picks up at this point.

Mick: Ok. So I’ve got a surprise. I don’t know if you know but as part of our Home Ed club we did a page of different games. So it’s on glitch.com and it’s called Glitch Game Club and it’s on there, there’s one for Home Ed Winter 2019 and here are all the games that we made. We made a lot of games. 15 games. This has not gone unnoticed because I got a message through this account. This is kind of a story now. We are entering a story. You have to use your imagination. We got a message and it was an audio message. If you guys take your fingers off your keyboards and have a listen to this audio message which is quite unusual as I don’t think it was from anyone on … this … Earth.

Greetings Earthlings, we have an important message for the Glitch Game Makers.
We are the Weean. You would call us an alien lifeforce. We like to think of ourselves as friendly space cousins.
We can see your Internet from space. We are contacting you because we know you are making games on the Internet.
We are on our way to the Planet Earth, and we have an important mission for you. We are an Intergalactic Rescue team. We know you have problems on your planet. We can help.
But we need to find out one thing first. Are you worth it? After we are gone will you also be able to help yourselves? Or are you already doomed to make the same mistakes again?
You must pass this challenge. Make some games showing problems you have on earth. In the games also include ideas for how to solve them.

We have some guidelines:

  • Make a game about a big or small problem to solve. If you can let us play it each week as you go along.
  • Give us an update each week by recording a group update.
  • Show you can work on your own but also work as part of a team.
  • We will also send you text messages with some mini-missions sometimes. Be sure to tell us how you do.

Please now get started and come up with a new game about solving a problem on Earth.

Mick: I couldn’t understand all of it but I tried to write it down as best as I can. So from what I’ve work out they’ve looked at our games and they’ve come up with a challenge for us. They are coming to Earth so they need to find out if we are worth saving. And the way that they are going to decide is by playing the games that we come up with. And they are going to set us little challenges. So. yeah, that’s the story. (with heavy irony) I’m pretty sure it’s true. (Mick and others laugh).

Mick: So all they’re asking us to do is to come up with a game. We’ve got four sessions. They want a new game because they’ve already played our old games. It’s got to be something about the problems of the world. I’ve got a lot of problems. It could be big problem or a small problem. It could be about your problems. But also ideas on how to solve them.
And yeah. That we can work by ourselves but also work as part of a team. So we’ve got to give them a report by the end of each session as well. That’s our mission.

Description of Vignette 4.1.a

The process of introducing a scenario for participant to respond to is common in project based learning in this vignette. Here it is extended using a dramatic element in line with Heathcote on Mantle of the Expert and other process drama techniques (explored in Lit Review). In this section, I describe the vignette using concepts from MoE. Further analysis follows in a later section.

The following tenets of MoE from Aiken’s summary [-@aitken_dorothy_2013] apply. Aitken’s and Heathcote’s terms follow in italics. Within a fictional context a responsible team is contracted into a commission by a client. The facilitator frames curriculum elements as productive tasks and plans for tensions to arise involving: authentic contexts, messiness of learning, maintaining learner interest and resilience to overcome the grappling and struggling involved. The following sections explore some of these key concepts via the example in vignette.

Contracting into drama

As a facilitator, I indicate that we are entering a dramatic process and attempt to draw everyone along with me using the following sentence “This is kind of a story now. We are entering a story. You have to use your imagination”. This serves to start the process of contracting in a drama. As a way to introduce the imagined audience, I reference that the games are online and have been noticed by aliens. The use of heavy irony in my voice when concluding the scenario, “I’m pretty sure it’s true” and the resulting laughter form an informal collusion that we are playing along with this fiction. The collusion is noted by both parents and children in recorded exchanges. For example, after engaging with a code example provided by myself in the role of the aliens, one pair make the following comment.

Parent: Look, this is what Mick’s showed, what Mick’s has done.

Child: The Weean have done!

Parent: The Weean, sorry yes.

Facilitator activities in role

My role is a link between the participant and the fictional commissioners of the games. The transcript above (a fuller version is in appendix 4.x) captures a rare example of myself extended facilitator input as instruction. As a practitioner teaching technology, I try to limit teacher talk and being overly directive to prevent learner disengagement. COMPLETE.

Balancing leaner choice with over-ambition is a tension explored in the previous chapter. The drama narrative helped resolve some of this personal tension by allowing me to outline boundaries and be directive using the dramatic commission as a foil to help avoid the encounter feeling personally combative or controlling [heathcote_drama_1985].

Learner activities in role

Beyond the wider fictional frame of the making activity, learners were also sometimes asked to undertake some activities in role, in particular reflection in role. This and other example are explored via the second vignette.

Vignette 4.1.b - Session reflections and secret missions

This second extract comes from the following session in phase four. In three of the four session the last 10 minutes of each session involved giving a progress update to the aliens.

Mick: Ok are you guys ready to share back if you could come to this side of the room we are going to get Mark and Edward to share back first. Everyone can share back using this computer that the Weean are watching if that’s alright. organiser

Mark: All we’ve done today is just get a background in and then we were just working on the one that the Weean had sent us about dropping the coins in. Now that the Weean have sent us the code we need for basically dropping stuff.

Mark: The idea is planting trees. about dropping seeds. So we want to drop those and have some enemies that are tweening randomly around and also taking them away. The idea is to have a timer to drop a certain amount in a certain time frame or you can’t go through to the next level. And the next level would be you go around and water all the trees. And the third one is you have to look after them all making sure they are not getting chopped down again by that tweening enemy. So we’ve got the concept and everything now and we’ve got the code So we should be able to make a bit of a jump forward now this week. It doesn’t look like we’ve got any where but we have. (Mark laughs and others follow). So we’ve got the the background in and we know what we need to do about scrolling as well because we want to scroll across.

Mick: That’s great. Is there anything that you think you definitely want to be able to do for next time that you might want help with?

Mark: Oh yeah. We’ll we’ve got a bit of space where we can work on it before we next come in so we’d like to ask the Weean some more questions. Is that the best way to do it?

Mick: Yeah for sure and I can see that you guys have been talking to the Weean, Here this project here in your home page called Talking to the Weean allows you to talk to the Weean. So you can go in there, click on Edit Project and if you click on this bit here that says WEEAN and then Markdown you can actually just ask questions in here.

(Mick reads out the following extract the organiser screen containting a text chat with the fictional alien audience)

Ed: Weean what’s it like up there?

Weean: It’s cold and very big but quite tranquil.

Ed: What is your name?

Weean: We are are the Weean we have no name, we are all the same.

Ed: That must be hard at xmas. (Mark and others laugh and smile.)

Weean: It is. It sure is.

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Mark: That’s tickled me that.

Mick: So there you go. You can have a conversation there with the Weean in there using mark up code you can copy what’s there. Nadine can you talk through what you have added to your game? Is yours called “No Toby Allowed” now. (Laughs from all)

Nadine: I’ve not really done much today as I was busy doing stuff with Toby’s

Dan: We noticed.

Nadine: We’ll I’ve changed the platform a bit

Molly : You had a secret mission though didn’t you

Nadine: Oh my secret mission was to change someone’s game, their character or something and see if they noticed. And I think they did notice.

Dan: We did. We did notice.

Molly : You couldn’t not notice.

Mick: It feels like you took the spirit of the mischievous thing and just turned up the volume. (All laugh.)

Molly: Sprite!

Mark: We also had a secret mission.

Mick: What was that?

Mark: Ours was to change the sound on somebodies game.

Nadine: Oh was it?

Mark: Did you notice?

Molly: Did you notice?

Nadine: No (laughing) (Incomprehensible many people talking or laughing at same time)

Mark: Play it now!

Richie: You definitely noticed. (Points to Mark and Ed) You definitely noticed my bit.

(Nadine goes to the keyboard and starts to play her game)

Nadine: I can’t hear anything different (Everyone laughs)

Mark: I thought you were going to go- Aaahgh! But you didn’t say anything.

Mick: So that’s interesting. some people notice some people didn’t.

Description of Vignette 4.1.b

In this extract participants are invited to take turns showing their game, recapping their progress and outlining next steps to the alien observers. I play the role as a liaison facilitating the process for the fictional, remote audience. I also draw attention to the secret missions that had been distributed to participants (along with social missions - both explore later in this chapter).

Relevant observations on side missions and drama from the data

The positive reaction of young people to the drama process was also picked up in interview data.

Mark: Tell us about the Weean?
Ed: er.
Mark: What did you like about the Weean?
Ed: Just very silly and I don't know. They answered your questions.
Mark: Was it, because there was a sense of play, a bit of fun and a bit of anarchy.
Ed: Yeah.
Mark: What else can you tell us about the Weean?
Ed: er.
Mark: There was the little sabotage things you had to do as well.
Ed: Yeah
Mark: So you liked those games where you had to kind of hack somebody else?
Ed: Yeah
...
Mark: The Weean thing was, I think, a massive hit for everybody because it just brought sense of play and fun. And it took attention away from it being overtly technical. Brought a personal element in and obviously that anarchy. Kids love the absurd.

There is more evidence of the impact of the drama process in the vignette above. In the end of session reflection, Richie occupies a peripheral position and continues to interact with his laptop. However, he reacts positively when Ed’s questions to the Weean are read out. He later adds to the discussion when it turns to the sabotage based missions set in the drama process. It is probably that the ability to represent his irreverent approach helped his participation in the more formal, collaborative reflection and feedback activity in a way that had not happened in previous sessions.

Reflecting in role

It doesn’t look like we’ve got anywhere but we have!

While drama scenarios can aid reflection both in or out of drama, O’Neill and Lambert outline the value of in-drama reflection, noting it is “likely to be more powerful than end-of-session discussion, since it allows individual and group insight to be articulated as part of the context” [-@oneill_drama_1982, p. 144]. In line with this intervention, they propose one way of achieving in-role reflection is to introduce an additional character that acts as an external audience. In this intervention however, main activities happen only weakly in role, whereas the end reflection highlights the fictional frame of the making more strongly.

In my journal notes for phases prior to using the drama process, I documented that the occasional end of session debriefs as go-rounds had limited success in terms of amount and quality of participation compared to these sessions. The video and audio recordings document rich feedback from individuals and pair teams, near complete participation and productive elements of interaction as the feedback progresses.

In previous iterations, my omission of end-reflection in sessions stemmed fomr a lack of time in sessions and reluctance to shift learners away from making activities to reflective activities. I found the need to maintain the drama narrative served as a high motivation factor to complete reflection activities.

To begin the reflection session I ask participants to gather around a particular computer which the aliens are monitoring which helped moving participants closer to each other and stop their coding activity. It is of value to review the grouping of participants in the still image in the vignette above in Fig 5.x. The simple clustering of participants so they were side by side and talking to a disembodied audience via a computer seemed to make the feedback process less daunting for students. One of the younger participants Richie is participating on the margins but clearly following proceedings as his facial reactions to ongoing contents of feedback. He later participates more actively when reflecting on his process than in previous sessions. Even participants that were initially reluctant to share back and had never shared back publicly before in sessions, chipped in after other family member had started the process for them.

Using the terms of student agency explored in the literature review, here we can see the use of the drama narrative used as a second stimulus both by facilitator to help convene learners and to help them participate in reflection, and project sharing [@sannino_principle_2015].

Observations on written interactions with the alien in the drama

Exploring documentation and accessing technical help within the drama frame

In the first phase of the project, I had promoted the use of a mailing list to ask technical and code questions of the wider group. This surfaced a conflict where parents were reluctant to bother other participants with such issues.

To address this, as part of the drama process, I encouraged participants to communicate with the aliens to ask help. To do this in a way that encouraged other participants to join in, I created a project in the shared coding project area with a webpage that could be edited and viewed by participants. When in the vignette 4.1.b Mark asks “We’d like to ask the Weean some more questions (to overcome coding blockages), is that the best way to do it?”, he is referring to this project webpage. To seed this process, I had entered a question sent by Mark and Ed via email into the page, and written a response on behalf of the aliens.

Dan and Toby also received help from the aliens to implement a pattern of creating random movement in their pac-man clone game. For this pair, the process of reading a code suggestion from the aliens gives the parent opportunity to deconstruct the code in detail to explore coding concepts. In later discussion, Dan uses the fiction of the alien to playfully chastise me for using code syntax which was harder for novices to read.

"Mick, do you think the aliens would mind if we get rid of the switch statement and replace it with some if-thens? They're just showing off these aliens aren't they?"

Here the text dialogue with the aliens is used as a mediating artefact first by the facilitator to share help in-role, and then by a parent to suggest a modification to the code syntax used and indicating a more general tactic of using readable code structures in novices.

Thus, in summary, the process of writing down a text request in-role potentially addresses the (previously-explored in Chapter 4) barriers asking for help by de-personalising the process. It also encourages the adoption of professional practice of asking a written question to overcome a coding problem and thus builds experience of using technical terms. While this aspect of the drama process was introduced by the facilitator, in alignment with the understanding of Sannino’s concepts of transformative agency through double stimulation (TADS) participants transform the function of the alien conversation to their own purposes. This theme is developed in the next section.

Playful dialogue with the aliens unrelated to game making

The process of asking the aliens for technical help within a code project sparked a playful process of informal chatting with the aliens. During in our end of session reflection above, I noted the following ad-hoc encounter that a child initiated on the interactive page while his father was taking a break from coding.

Ed: hi WEEAN what is it like up there :)
Weean: It is cold and very big but quite tranquil too.  all the same.
Ed: What is your name?
Weean: We are are the Weean we have no name, we are all the same.
Ed: That must be hard at xmas
Weean: It is. It sure is.

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Inspired by the positive reaction of participants to this playful engagement with the fictional audience, I asked a student helper to participate remotely to play the part of the alien. The student then gave feedback via live text interaction to participants in the final session. The process started with supportive and celebratory messages posted from the alien. The impact was significant with the young people with 5 out of 7 engaging by writing messages and all mentioning the interactions verbally during the session.

The live chat began to fulfill a function of building insider rapport, creating a fun atmosphere, celebrating the completion of games in the absence of a public showcase, and signposting the achievements of other participants. For some pairs, while the child interacted in the live chat, parents performed final tweaks to code projects and challenges. Two parents in particular worked hard debugging more complex elements of the game with facilitators and peers. Other parents engaged with the chat and encouraged their children to get feedback from the aliens about their game in particular.

The start of process began when Ed in a moment of free time expanded the use of space initially imagined to address technical needs by initiation a playful interaction which, while in the motivation to support different learner identities, was a novel, volitional action in this context. It is helpful to expore this interaction using AT and TADS terminology. Ed is in conflict, not able or wanting to engage in his existing creative activities while his father has a social break. Using the secondary stimulus of a text chat with fictional aliens, he writes a playful personal question to the aliens as an expression of volitional action to play, casts out an experimental kedging anchor. By co-incidence, I was on a different computer, saw this question, and was able to respond in real time. Thus, by getting a response, Ed’s kedging anchor caught onto an anchor point and Ed was able to resolve this conflict of inactivity and in doing so both amuse himself and other other with humorous self-expression, and open-up a novel, child-centred activity for the whole group which could also address potential issues of alienation from the culture of serious coding expressed by other participants.

Use of side missions to encourage varied creative practices

In addition to the the main mission of given in role to make a game to entertain and inform visiting aliens, and extra social and secret mission were delivered with the frame of a drama process, with an explicit aim to encourage community-focused patterns of behaviour which had emerged in previous iterations of game making. These include social aspect of playtesting and playful interactions, explored in later section in this chapter, which I had identified these behaviours as potentially helpful in maintaining the positive affect and identification with the on-going group process of game making.

A table of both social and public missions follows. These mission were printed out on cards and one of each type was given to the participants in the first half of the first two sessions.

Your Alien Mission (social)	Your Secret Alien Mission:
Find out the names of 3 games that are being made.	Change the variables at the start of someone else’s game to make it play in a funny way.
Make a list of characters in two other games being made.	Change of the images in someone else’s project to a totally different image and see if they notice.
Find out the favourite computer games of 4 people.	Change the level design of the first level of someone else’s project to make it impossible but try to change as little as possible to do that.
Find out who plays the most computer games per week in your group.	Change of the images in someone else’s project to a very similar but slightly different version and see if they notice.
Find out what other people are planning. Give some friendly feedback to one other person / group. Why don’t you try…	Add a rude sound to someone else’s project.
Ask 2 different groups if they have thought about what sounds they are going to put in their game.	Swap over some sounds in someone else’s project and see if they notice.
Find out from three groups if they are going to try any totally new ideas.	Delete all of the code of someone else as they are editing it and see how they react. Then help them get it back using the Rewind function.

In the transcript above of vignette 4.1.b we see that in the end-of-session reporting back participants engage in a lively discussion about the secret missions they had been given. Encouraged by her mother Molly, Nadine shares that she has been highly engaged in a disruptive secret mission. Dan and Toby express playful frustration. Mark and Ed contribute by sharing their more subtle disruption and Richie is keen to have his rude noise mission noticed and commented on. Some public missions had a noticeable impact in this session particularly in stimulating a discussion among parents around which arcade games they played as youths.

These sanctioned non-design activities, designed to reduce participant stress, to encourage the exploration of the games of others are taken up enthusiastically by much of the community. In analysis of one key sessions involving missions from which the transcript was taken. Out of 10 participants, 8 visibly engaged with the secret missions during the session.

The process was not without friction. After initially engaging with the process of secret games, Toby and Dave, who were later working on a tricky coding process, expressed frustration at interference. Thus, while promising, limits to this process should be evaluated to avoid overly disruptive behaviour which create barriers to progress. For example, time limits could be in place.

Side missions or side quests are also used in open world games are used in part to appeal to different kinds of players and are often models on Bartle’s taxonomy of game player types [@bartle_hearts_nodate]. In this phase, parents Molly and Mark both used the prompts of the social missions to take a break from their creative work using the software toolset to talk to other parents and children. This supported and encouraged behaviours that I had observed in the previous stage where they had been energised by breaks for coding and interactions with others. This activity helps addresses one of the key barriers to taking part in a coding community that of alienation from the culture of hardcore coding.

  Mark: Right we’ve got a background in. Do you. Do you want to reply to the Weean.
  Ed: Yes. (Ed starts to type very slowly)
  Mark: (after some time) While you do that I’m going to go do my mission.
  Ed: What's your mission?
  Mark: To find out about other people's favourite games.
  Ed: Alright.

While the some of the secret missions encouraged forms of disruptive play, griefing of playing against the game [@bakioglu_spectacular_2008; @bartle_hearts_nodate]. While this increases engagement for some learners, the process also suffered the danger that participants transgress levels of cheekiness and play which explores boundaries, to more disruptive ones. In this context this involved frustration and wasted time for other users. The vignette above shows a chance for the parent to express his frustration at the process in a playful way.

The use of missions introduced by facilitator are taken up voluntarily by participants and work to address conflicts caused by identity clashes by recognising and encouraging diverse making approaches and styles of community participation. A BIT MORE ON AGENCY?

Concluding remarks on process drama

This section has explored the use of the possibilities of a drama process to support both the leaner expression of agency and as a pedagogical process for facilitators to militate probable conflicts and obstacles for learners in the creative process. The mission-based interventions began as naturally occurring expression of learner agency which became incorporated into the drama process. The next section examines the affordances and impact of the coding environment and starting game template, which in a similar way, evolved in response to participant use of earlier iterations of the toolset. Conversely, examples of more unguided practices and use of tools which served to increase the scope of agency are explored in the final section of this chapter.

Discussion on dimensions of authenticity in in relation to Agency

Returning to the work of drama processes, Heathcote [@heathcote_drama_1994] warns against asking participants to genuinely make items in the processes explored. To do so, she argues, would expose their inexpertness in the cold light of day.

“if they are makers of things (for example, shoes, ballgowns, or aircraft) they must never (within the fiction, that is) be asked to create the actual objects. If they had to do this their in expertness would become immediately apparent.”[@heathcote_drama_1994, p. 18]

Authentic tools in settings where students may find their novice skills lacking can negatively impact on experiences of self-efficacy and thus agency. While this is clearly the case in factory-based drama process, the value of digital tools allows students to to work with more authentic practices.

CALL BACK TO AUTHENTICITY OF LAST CHAPTER - LINK TO AGENCY

In chapter four the use of coding tools and the impact on instrumental agency was explored.

Authenticity in project approaches can profitably be applied to tools, processes and project goals [@hung_engaged_2006]. Authenticity in goal here is clear. Participants make a real digital game. The authentic goal of making a game allowed participants to draw on tacit knowledge and navigate within implicit bounds reducing the need for intrusive instruction which might negatively effect feelings of agency.

As explored in this chapter and in chapter four, the authenticity of the tools and processes involved are more complex.

Playtesting processes are authentic and often informed by existing real experience as game players. These observations are in-line with existing research outlining the value of playtesting in game-making [FIND] and to address cultural barriers to coding cultures [@disalvo_glitch_2009].

There are examples of the authenticity of the audience being used by participants

• Suzanna uses the imagined audience to norm behaviour.
• Olivia (Th) imagines the impact of her game on real students as a motivational factor and one which drives design decisions. The use of code playgrounds and js? structured along design principles which align with affordance theory.

THEREFORE - WHAT IS THE KEY POINT HERE?

While authenticity in coding context is potentially off-putting or prohibitive if too complex, it is motivating if linked with real life competencies and culturally relevant activities and outputs. In this context there is an explicit link between participant feelings of self-efficacy and their growing experiences of agency.

Educators should be aware of this tension and help resolve it by developing their competency and using simplified professional tools. The benefits to leaners are increased experience of agency, through x, y and z. And the development of an activity systems which has the following benefits / characteristics.

While this is broadly in line with PBL theories, and constructionism the use of CHAT perpective on agency brings some useful tools to the researcher and practitioner. CROSSREFF - list the benefits here.

Positive affective space within a drama process

The work in this research around designing and coding in role and creating a playful context and language mirrors work done in learning languages to reduce learner anxiety by leveraging the potential for drama processes to create positive “affective spaces” [@piazzoli_process_2011; @stinson_dol_2006]. The drama process can be viewed as magic circle [@stenros_defence_2012; @whitton_playful_2018]. A magic circle is a concept which transmits the idea that game players enter a loosely bounded play space where they accept arbitrary play rules and enter a social contact to adopt a playful attitude.

The experience of myself and participants being more comfortable performing some of the activities in role is facilitated by contracted together into a playful agreement where risk of perceived failure is reduced. In my journal notes, I observed, that when listing boundaries to activities within role, it felt similar to outlining the rules of a game rather that constricting their behaviour. Thus, I felt more relaxed restricting choice in role via the proxy of a playful encounter compared to my previously I concerns surrounding participants feeling overly controlled.

In addition, I believe part of my hesitancy in shifting activity from participant-led game making to reflection, or accessing documentation, stemmed from worrying that the learners would also find this shift in objective, from the organically developing design and play testing activity system to an externally imposed system of reflecting on progress, would be jarring, potentially disorientating and reduce learner engagement and positive affect towards the overall process. In other words, provoking a feeling that the fun’s over, it’s back to school. I propose that the drama fiction eases friction between competing activity system objectives.

The freedoms and restrictions of playgrounds

In this research, similar metaphors have emerged in the pedagogical and technical process surrounding the concept of playgrounds and gardens. In the previous section the use of a curated set of design patterns can be referred to as a walled garden or sandbox. The process of checking the performance of games is called playtesing. The web-based environment which reduce the complexity of web development and provide community and immediate feedback are named code playgrounds. While some of this language is specific to the creation of games, other terms are also prevalent in non-game coding.

These metaphors invite a connection to play theories concept of as the magic circle. Play theorist outline the value of stepping into a more controlled area of voluntary experimentation where the fear of failure is reduced. Game rules are norms which seed participation in community processes. The playful context of the game’s magic circle can facilitate participants to adapt norms and rules to their own playing styles. Through this lens, the interaction of playtesting, code playgrounds and a sandbox of game patterns emerge as a key practices to facilitate and maintain learner agency. The discussion of the next chapter explores the intersection of these elements in more detail.

Extending the metaphor - anchoring in sheltered harbours

This chapter has discussed affordences of a bespoke and mutually designed learning exeriences and their impact on learner agency. At times, Sannino’s metaphor of a kedging anchor thrown by participants to pull themselves out of a conflict or blockage in their process has been used. The metaphor is useful to explain the active process of participants seekig to resolve conflicts and problems in their creative processes. However, much research employing this metaphor is often used in less-structured workplace settings. As such, the designed nature of the environment is less relevant. This section proposes an expansion of the metaphor to encompass concerns of a more structured learning design.

In the original metaphor the casting of the anchor is random, experimental. It is unsure if the anchor will catch on anything under the surface. However, in this design, participants aim for affordances as visible anchor points. In the design above such anchor points include: regular play-testing; the use of documentation; and highlighed variables and level structure in the quick start stage.

To aid learners agency, designers notice existing paths of participants and add explicit anchor points and make them visible to learners. The process is on-going and mutual. Additionally, this work happens in an facilitated environment. Design decisions server to clarify common problems areas, thus making the water clearer to better see anchor points. The job of the designer is in part to identify the causes of turbulence and thus create support in a sheltered space of a harbour.

Many design decisions were made to create a supported, simplified coding environment. Relevant examples from the previous chapter include: using an online code playground; skirting use of specialist terminology; hiding away un-needed complexity in the code template.

While it is important to acknowledge the danger that such support may make learners run into trouble if coding other projects outside of this supported space, the use of authentic code language makes this less of an issues than with specialised coding environments aimed at novices [@hagge_coding_2018]. Thus to make one addition to the metaphor this design is like a sea-harbour, tools like Scratch are like a swimming pool.

Implications in conceptualisations of forms of agency

Previous chapters explored varied understandings of agency. To here is a potential tension between instrumental agency and transformative agency. In designing out conflicts the facilitator may reduce the capacity for participants to profitably address them, both as individuals pair or collectively as a group. There is a balance here for the facilitator to take an appropriate position on. The following conclusion explores these tensions in more depth.

Conclusion

A different but relevant challenge is the difficulty of structuring resources in a way which can support the diversity of the directions in which participant want to progress their design. Drawing from authentic resources can be chaotic and create problematic errors.

Participants may also lack the concepts and technical language needed to find external support materials easily. Some of these challenges are potentially addressed through the combination of possibilities of the starting and a selection of curated code examples. The next chapter explores the use of a collection of game design patterns to help address these issues.