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Except for this next 10 minutes,
I'm sure you'd all rather be out somewhere playing
and essentially the goal of our whole existence,
if we had a utopia, if we were in a position
where all of our basic needs were presented to us,
we wouldn't have to work and what would we do?
There's only one other option, and that's to play.
And it's a fundamental human condition
that everybody loves to play and sadly
we don't get enough opportunity to do it
and unfortunately even worse sometimes in the school context
we don't do it very well.
So a number of you have a ball here
and I guarantee you that if you were somewhere else
you'd probably be playing with it
especially because these special kinesiology balls,
which you can have that one, light up
and allow you to play with them as we go.
So essentially in doing activities and playing
within the school physical education context,
which is the primary site where we learn to play games,
sadly a number of children
don't have the most positive experience
due to a number of constraints.
In other words, they don't have the skill
to play the activity that the teacher has presented to them
or the games are presented in exclusionary ways.
So for example,
hand up if you've got one of the flashy balls.
You can design a game and play with it when you go outside.
Hand up if you've just got the boring old tennis ball.
You couldn't play the games that these people designed
if they were allowed to play with it as they wish.
And so you're in a position where you're constrained
by a different element, usually by the environment.
And so sadly we get in situations
where it's not the result of the game itself
that leads young people to become disaffected.
It's the way that it's presented,
the way that it's structured
and sometimes the social environment
that the teacher allows to foster
where the dominant children get to make all the decisions.
Now, if we flip the paradigm and say,
"You with the tennis ball can make all the decisions
"about what's happening in the games,"
then that might exclude some of you others
because your ball has a different density,
you can do different things with it.
And so essentially what happens in most cases,
and it happens in most classrooms
across all the academic areas,
it certainly happens across most classes
in university settings, is that the teacher
or the lead instructor or the people with the highest status
get to make all the decisions about who does what.
And so if you were to design a game,
for example with your flashy ball there,
and you said, "This is what we're going to do,"
and everybody in the audience here
is going to play that game
a number of folks would be disaffected,
maybe not particularly motivated
because they don't enjoy the game that you've designed.
So in order to help young people get in a position
where they learn about what play is
and they learn to play games that are enjoyable
we instigate a particular curriculum model
called student designed games.
And this is a process where we ask the young people
to create and practice and refine their own games
and we say refinement
because the first time you design a game
something won't work, someone will make a suggestion
about how to play it better.
And so in the slide that you see on the screen there,
that was a group of young people here, 5th grade students,
we asked them to design their own batting and fielding game.
That was a game where you had a ball
and you sent it out and you hit it or kicked it
and then you ran round bases.
Something like softball or baseball.
They could design the game however they wanted.
However, we put another constraint on them
and we said, "You also have to build the equipment
"that you're gonna use to play with it."
And so that bat there is a big swimming pool noodle
on a stick, they've got a hoop, balls were made
from anything from wrapped up rubber bands in duct tape,
and perhaps the most famous game of all
was called Biscuit Ball because their ball
was a frozen biscuit, which they wrapped in duct tape
and at the end of every game they had to stick it back
in the freezer.
And the exciting thing about that game
was that due to the irregularity of the shape of the ball
it kept zooming off in all sorts of places.
There was another unfortunate game made with a ball
made of a couple of T shirts
wrapped up in a plastic bag and duct tape,
which eventually be called Sewer Ball
because you can know where the ball ended up one day
while they were playing it.
Now the teacher doesn't in this process
just let the children go off willy nilly.
They provide constraints about what's acceptable
in terms of particularly safety.
What are the guidelines that you can do
in terms of the game.
So if the children invent a rule or put in a game place
where some people may be put at risk,
teacher has the capacity to make that change.
And to create this positive learning experience
where all the young people have a voice, alright?
So we have our friend here with the orange ball
that dominates the discussion,
"No, we're going to do this, we're going to do that,"
and the teacher's role is to make sure
that everybody's voice is heard.
So what sort of games do students come up with?
First of all, and most incredibly,
they design games that are playable.
And we call them games that work.
And essentially a game that works means
that the offensive side and the defensive side
are reasonably balanced.
So young children and middle aged children and adults
aren't going to design games where the score
is like 50 to nothing after a couple of minutes
because the game, it doesn't work.
Because the offense never gets a chance to score
or defensively you can't stop anybody.
And we initiate that by playing tag games frequently
at the beginning where we'll have one chaser,
one person's the tagger, and everybody else in this room
is being tagged and we can play anywhere in the university.
No one's ever gonna get tagged.
Then we'll have five taggers and three people
who are fleeing on the stage.
And of course no one's ever going to be able to escape.
And so they learn to make these modifications.
So they do design games that work.
They find these balances between attack and defense
or scoring and non scoring or batting and fielding
to make them nice and even.
School age children and university students as well,
when they design these games, have a great intent
to try to make the games inclusive.
So they never include games where anybody's eliminated
which teachers often do.
They try to make them very inclusive that everybody gets,
put in deliberate rules
about how many people have to touch the ball
before they can score, et cetera.
However, dependent on their skill level
and dependent also on their gender,
we've done some research on this,
boys and girls do go about designing the games
in slightly different ways.
Girls are much more recipe book oriented.
And so what they do is they'll take the template,
what's it going to be about, what's gonna be a ball,
how do you score, and they'll go through it systematically.
Boys, on the other hand, are more brick-large.
They just throw things together, move that base here,
bring it in, or whatever.
Higher skilled children tend to be more like that,
lower skilled children tend to be more deliberate.
And they also design games
based on the element of competition and level of skill.
So higher skilled children will design games
that are more complex and more competitive.
Lower skilled youngsters design games
that are often more cooperative.
But in all cases they design games that are playable.
And so the theory behind this is the idea of constraints.
And constraints are things that limit us
to allow us to do things.
We have individual constraints, that's our skill level,
that's our motivation, that's our growth.
So a big tall fellow
is probably going to be pretty constrained
in being a gymnast and a little small person
is going to be reasonably constrained
if they wanted to be a high jumper or a volleyball player.
Then you've got the environmental factors,
that's the situations in which they play.
And then of course you've got the constraints of the task.
The interesting thing about games is
that the easiest way to do it,
to achieve the goal of the game, is forbidden.
So if you think about playing golf.
What we're trying to do in golf
is to get the ball in the hole.
What's the easiest way to do it?
Pick it up, walk, put it in.
Well we put in these rules that we have to do things.
The same with running a 200 meters in the Olympics.
The quickest way
is to just run across the middle of the track, right?
But we make people go around.
And so my theory is that young people are really good
at thinking about their own individual task
and environmental constraints and design games
with those in mind;
although, that's never at the level of consciousness
because they're inventing games that work.
And if the game works that means they can play it.
They never include skills they can't do.
That's one thing that you won't ever see
in student designed games.
So to test this theory, which is coming up
in the next series of these student designed games processes
is to have a group of older students,
maybe 9th or 10th grade students,
and give them the task
instead of designing a game for yourself,
which is what we've done to date,
you're now going to go to another school
and you're going to design games for 4th graders.
And we'll look specifically at the sorts of questions
that they ask me and of the young people.
So if they ask things like, "What equipment can we use?
"What do they like to do?
"How many of them are there?
"How long of these games have we got to play?
"Can we see them in their physical education class
"and see what they can do?"
These would give us an indication that subconsciously
they're looking at this constraints and you would think
that they would be the sorts of questions
that would be asked by these young people
but at the moment that's contentious.
And so that's the theoretical challenge.
And so in summarizing, when each of you leave here
with your ball, 'cause it's yours to keep,
you will do with it in a playful manner.
It's not going to be for you a work object.
It's gonna be a playful object
and play is the central objective
and it's the fundamental notion of why we exist,
is to play not to work, thank you.
(applause)