Game-A-Palooza

Last school year I started a Game Design Club in my middle school library. This year, I couldn't commit to a year-long before school club, even on an every-other-week basis, but I knew I still had students who were designing and creating their own games, and I wanted to be sure they had a forum to share them.

I also enjoy game nights with my friends, and I thought the power of bringing people together to play games - just for fun - was a great idea to connect our community. Since it is always challenging to find time in our busy school calendar, I scheduled this event on a Saturday morning in January, from nine to noon.

Scheduling

My original vision for the time was that for the first hour, people could come and learn how to play games. The second hour would be for practicing and demonstrations of original games, and the third hour would be for tournaments. However, since schedules are so busy, it ended up being a flexible drop-in time, so participants got to try whatever games were available for that time block.

I had student leaders sign up to run games for an hour or 90 minutes or all three hours. I lined up a few adult volunteers for each of the three hours so I wouldn't be alone if I had a huge turnout, and I arranged for the robotics team to come with small test plane kits for the last hour.

I set up signage for each time block to put out at each station area, so it was clear where each station leader could go as they arrived to lead their games. We had original student games, a D&D group (we have a thriving campus D&D club run by two colleagues), card games, strategy games, word games, and more. Some student leaders showed up and ran their station for an hour and then moved on to play other games for the next two hours.

Unlike our Trivia Night in the fall, we did not require pre-registration for students to attend, so we didn't know how many people to expect. School families were welcome to attend, and it ended up being a very cold day, so we served hot cocoa. While the turnout was somewhat small (about 40 people total), most of the attendees stayed the whole time. I didn't schedule myself at a game station so I'd be available to deal with whatever popped up, but since the event was kind of small, I was able to rotate to different stations and play different kinds of games with students and their parents - it was really fun!

Robotics Team Station

Original student-created game

What I Learned

Next time, I think I'd start the event at 10 and stop at noon - we didn't really need all three hours and it would give students a little more time to sleep in. We had far more people by 11:00 than we did right at 9:00.

It was smart to coordinate with student representatives from D&D Club and the Robotics Team liaison - those groups got to showcase their clubs a little, and they provided some variety at the event.

I didn't intentionally prohibit screen-based games, but it ended up being kind of refreshing and more of a connecting event since the games were all face to face instead.

I would do a lot more promotion directly to families well in advance next time. I promoted a lot to students in classes, and approached game station leaders directly to ask if they would help out and what station they'd like to manage. We had students running stations and their parents and younger siblings (3rd - 5th grade) came to play along with our middle school students. It was a really nice free family event with no prep or big demands - I think we would have had a lot of interest if there weren't so many other competing demands that it's hard for people to be aware of everything going on at school.

When I ask people to register in advance, we tend to get lower turnouts, because people don't want to commit until the last minute. It's nicer for families to be able to drop in without signing up, but it was pretty stressful to have no idea who was coming. If we had had 100 people show up, it would have been overwhelming to the space and we would have had to spill into the hall, so some type of pre-registration might be needed if the event continues to grow.