Alex Wolf is a friend I met on Fred Wilson’s wonderful blog community, AVC.com. Alex has been plotting to change the way children’s games are designed for the past couple of years and she’s been keeping us all engaged in her journey.
In this interview, Alex talks about her latest game “Ani-gram It” and her journey from designer to game inventor.
Enjoy!
My favorite bits –
“Ani-gram-it is a board game that’s a crossword style game. I’m not allowed to use any big brand names, but it’s like that game that you play with a crossword. Instead of using letters to build a word, you use body parts to build an animal.”
“One of my favorites is Sugata Mitra on TED talking about SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environments). It’s not organized learning environments. To me the game is really a soul in itself. It’s a group-learning situation, but it’s not just group learning. It’s play.”
“Knowledge is a bunch of stuff. What you do with it is what happens after. I think we spend so much time in education stuffing the stuff in that that’s the primary activity. If we can make the acquisition of knowledge easy and elegantly structured in your mind, then you can start the real work. That’s when you start having the fun.”
“I think that you have to choose as few things as you can get by with and make them really smart.”
“Another productivity hack is just not having a lot of stuff. My productivity hack is that you don’t need a spatula and a cheese slicer. You just need a cheese slicer that you can use as a spatula. We don’t need as many things as we think we need.”
“Play has been where we are at heart. The more I become involved in the thinking of game and toy design, new forms of learning, how we’re engaging children at school, how we’re engaging them at home, how they connect with their peers, and how we connect with them , the more I realize that play is really core. Animals that play successfully are the ones who survive better.”
The full transcript, as always, on RealLeaders.tv
A Learning a Day 