If you’ve never been to a game jam, it’s a space for playful and practical learning. You’ll be assigned to a mixed team of game designers and sex educators and challenged with a series of small projects to build your skills and teamwork. Expect to collaborate with people from outside of your region, with different professional backgrounds or design experiences. Your final project will be to create a new sex education lesson that uses games.
The format for this course is inspired by game design communities who gather to design, build, and share new creative work under tight time constraints. We know from experience that small-group collaboration under the pressure of a tight time limit can create wholly original things. For this course, the design challenge is creating interactive, immersive experiences that are also high-quality relationships and sexuality education. To meet this audacious goal, this practicum gathers sex educators and analog game designers into teams, trains them on the subjects least familiar to them, and supports them with hands-on coaching as they build new lessons.
This game jam is different than others in several ways. We assign participants into presumptive teams and have them complete short exercises together to see how they gel. People can and should change teams, but please don't enter the workshop with a team already planned out. Clitical Hits also includes a several hours of learning in workshops before you start on your own original design. We want edugames to be accessible to everyone, so expect lessons on sex ed, game design, and educational games. For more details, see the section titled Schedule Overview below.
A note about homework. This course is designed for working people with other responsibilities. We will assign a short reading, reflection, or game to play between sessions. However, we intend students to complete the bulk of their design and playtesting of their final sex ed lesson during our four course sessions.