Game Design & Employment Skills Workshops
Soft Chaos was chosen by a research group headed by Kristen Gillespie to collaborate with Tech Kids Unlimited to help improve on existing neurodiversity-affirming summer workshops for Autistic & AuDHD students.
Client
Research group funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation)
Service
Teaching, Workshops, and Talks
Date
Mar-Aug 2023
The Challenges
Our team needed to create a curriculum, including resources and lectures, that would be taught over the course of a short 2-week period. After the lessons, each student had one week to create a game.
The Process
Ahead of the workshops, Soft Chaos met with the NSF research team to understand their priorities and needs. From there, we rewrote the syllabus and curriculum for the program based on learning objectives established by the project's advisory board, which included seventy distinct lessons and activities to be taught over thirteen days as well as a final project in the form of a game per student.
The Outcome
The curriculum was a resounding success - more students than ever had created their own game by the end of the thirteen-day workshops. We were also able to help the NSF Research team to gather research data about the student experience which subsequently has been adapted into papers and posters about autistic youth and their learning experience.
Our favorite parts of collaborating with Soft Chaos included learning from their authentic commitment to making the world more inclusive for neurodivergent people, how their humor and creativity cast a sparkle onto sometimes difficult work, and the ways that their multidisciplinary skill set helped diverse team members collaborate not only effectively, but also joyfully. We couldn't recommend Soft Chaos more strongly to future collaborators.
Kristen Gillespie
The Project
Design and lead two thirteen-day workshops about game design, self-advocacy, and job skills for a group of around twenty autistic students with a broad range of ages and experiences, all while facilitating the collection of research data about the program and applying neurodiversity-affirming principles to our teaching practices.
The Client
Led by lead NSF-funded researcher Kristen Gillespie in collaboration with Tech Kids Unlimited, our client for this project was a research group with no official structure or name made up of researchers interested in studying autistic youth. Some of the researchers were autistic or neurodivergent themselves, while others were neurotypical. We also worked with occupational therapists and support staff. They had run two previous iterations of the program that they were seeking a workshop leader for.
THE CHALLENGES
Here were the bigger hurdles for the task at hand:
- A large number of learning objectives for students. A small number of days to learn them.
- A short teaching window for workshops facilitated by Soft Chaos to take place.
- A complex schedule with multiple partners and their competing objectives:
- Execute workshops, project implementation, and improvement
- Students’ learning objectives
- Flexible and responsive to neurodivergent students in real time
- Data collection by research team
- Needing to make time for data collection from students for research team to meet their objectives.
- Creating a lot of new lectures and curriculum resources to meet requirements of project.
- Maintaining neurodiversity-affirming space and practices.
- Helping students learn to self-advocate and work through conflict, as individuals within a team.
THE PROCESS
To conquer these hurdles, Soft Chaos had to bring their strategic A-game. Which is good. There is nothing our team loves more than a hefty, time bound challenge.
Before the workshops, Soft Chaos met with the NSF research team to understand their priorities and needs.
From there, we rewrote the syllabus and curriculum for the program based on learning objectives established by the project's advisory board.
Our team of three divided up the work load and the results were:
- 70 distinct lessons & activities to be taught in 13 days
- 1 final project, in the form of a game per student
We iterated on the schedule many times until we found a plan that met all the needs of the program. Our team coordinated with the stakeholders during the workshops to make sure everything was taken care of.
Our final schedule was set up so we could collect both data for research and student feedback in real-time during the 2 weeks of learning. This meant the Soft Chaos team could make changes and improvements mid-project before the second cohort of students. We then taught the entire workshop again to a new group of students while adapting to their needs.
THE OUTCOME
Our team was thrilled to be a part of this project, and we’re proud to have helped Kristen Gillespie, NSF-funded researcher, and her extended team, both in the reworking of their workshops and curriculum, and the aid of research data throughout.
28/40 students made games as part of the program (the highest number of any year so far). Students learned game design, self-advocacy and job-related skills. (They also said they had a great time learning with us!)
The students almost universally said that they enjoyed the workshop and learned valuable skills from it. Knowing how important interest and ease can be in neurodivergent learning spaces, we take this feedback as the high praise that it is.
Soft Chaos also learned more about formal practices for working with neurodivergent people (including ourselves), neurodiversity-affirming principles, and how to continue our work of fostering inclusive spaces!
