Folk Lab is a place where everyone can come and learn to use technology to create things. We have 3d printers and laser cutters and tools and materials to create stickers, key hangers, fridge magnets — and games.
One day per week I run a game design workshop where we design and construct games. Afternoons are open for mid school children, 10-12 years. They drop in on their way home from school and use the computers for projects. Four evenings per week are open for young adults, 13+. I do Fridays. My favourite tool is our Falcon plywood cutter. My wife has accepted that I smell of burnt wood when I come home from Folk Lab.
Activities are funded by grants. Which means we are constantly looking for ways to fund future activities. Which means we need to be able to explain what it is we do and why we need to keep doing it.
The challenge
Morgan Karlsson, the visionary behind Folk Lab (and Folkets Hus Hallunda where Folk Lab is a part), approached me a few weeks ago. We have access to super fast internet, a lag so small that you can play music together. He wanted to use this technology for a cross location event with a place in the other end of Sweden. And he wanted us to play games that we could create the materials for at both ends.
My immediate thought was that this is hard: Most physical games use shared components that both sides can touch and move. But then the gears started turning…
Here is what I came up with.
The idea
Language is the key to technology. To help each other use machines to build things we need to a shared language to describe quite precisely what needs to be done. I wanted to create a game we can play in Folk Lab that illustrates this.
Pentominoes are shaped that you can form using five equally sized squares. There are 12 different pentominoes. Some are symmetric. Some you can flip and have point another way. I learned about pentominoes years ago from reading Martin Gardner, the grand old man of recreational mathematics. I have used them with my kids before.
Some pentominoes look like letters, c, w, l. Others less so. Which is great. There is a key mapping the 12 pentominoes to latin letters. But it is not immediately obvious.
Instructing someone else to build a shape with pentominoes is a nice language exercise. You can do this across locations using visual and audio only with each end having their own set. Team up with someone in the other end and see how good you are at solving this task together.
Preparation
I found a shape with all 12 pentominoes on Wikimedia and created a print file that would fit on an A4 plywood sheet.
I printed the tokens this week (two sets) and put them on the table in the common area. I asked volunteers to help form shapes out of three different pentominoes. Then I took pictures of these with my phone. And printed the shapes in black and white and cut out, 20 per sheet (I only did one sheet — the number of permutations is huge).
Family night
Yesterday at our family night I put the game on the table. We had great fun.
We speak four languages in our household. I’m Danish, my wife is Ukrainian, we live in Sweden. I speak English with my wife and my youngest. My wife speaks Ukrainian with our children. I speak Danish with my oldest. We all speak Swedish at school or work.
This does lead to funny misunderstandings from time to time. Sometimes we play guess-a-language. But we manage — and have learned ways to deal with this. So we should be the perfect guinea pig for a language game/activity. This is how we played.
How to play
Players form teams of two. They take turns drawing a card that shows a shape to build. Each shape consists of three pentominoes touching. Without showing the card to the other player, they need to instruct the other player to build the shape shown.
I set it up with three difficulty levels. First, you get to show how to build it. Both sides can see each other’s build area. Next, the instructor can see what the other player is building but the building area of the instructor is hidden. Third, neither side can see the build area of each other and have to rely on spoken words only. (An optionally fourth level is when the person building is not allowed to speak).
The cards have increasing difficulty levels. Shapes where you use the symmetric shapes are easier. With the asymmetric shapes, a common mistake is to build a mirror image. I’ve played around with a few shapes where you place pieces on top of each other, this is a fun twist to throw in too.
Builds are timed. You get one minute on easy, two minutes on hard.
When the team has completed the task, you lift the screen and compare the two builds. If both are correct and on time, you score three points. Deduct one point each for not finishing in time, each wrong piece, and for building a mirror of the solution.
What we learned
As my wife and oldest speak Ukrainian together, they named the pieces after the Cyrillic letters. Which in one case lead to misunderstanding which was fun to watch and which we could all learn from. The value of active listening (“what I hear you say is [what I understood but spoken with my own words]). The value of having a shared vocabulary and a shared reference frame. And what to do when we don’t have one (check if we have one and create it if not).
Looking forward to share the game with the rest of the team at Folk Lab.
You are welcome to drop by at Folk Lab in Hallunda. We are open weekdays from 14-18 and evenings until 21 (Fridays 20).