“The Meta-Challenge” > “How do P2PU Challenges work?” @ Drumbeat Festival

The Mozilla Drumbeat festival is coming soon and we are going to be running a bunch of fun workshops with fellow P2PUians. Since we have been putting a lot of effort in creating a new “challenge-based” learning model at P2PU we want to test it out by having people create their own p2pu challenges around topics of their own interest in an open setting. Before we talk more about the session though let’s answer what is a “challenge” in P2PU; 

A “challenge” is a social learning module within P2PU that;

• Has a very clear goal that signals achievement, with enough flexibility to take different paths to reach it.
• Provides a scaffolded experience were an objective is broken down to smaller tasks.
• Is framed in a motivating and fun way that sparks curiosity and interesting questions.   
• Has participants “make things” as part of their learning
• Is clearly tied to badges that recognize skills that vary from learning how to set a DNS to being able to provide helpful feedback; 
• Embraces peer interaction as part of the learning, were people have to share and remix resources together in order to reach a goal.
• Ultimately involves the community into the development of more and better challenges.

So what will we be doing?

Our “Design Challenge” at Drumbeat will have you play a card game to come up with new P2PU challenges (its a meta-challenge!) which we will then share online in a beloved etherpad (this one). Each challenge will aim to teach others something new on topics that could vary from programming in Python to cooking artichokes (it really depends on your interests). At the end of the session we will have a good insight of how P2PU challenges work as well as a great collection of ideas that we can implement inside and outside p2pu.org

About the game:

“Playstorm” is a game I first played in a Digra workshop I run about a month ago (photo below, we made HTML5 zombies); it’s a card game of brainstorming duels, one that involves the wild and often outrageous process of combining concepts like “javascript” with actions such as “ranting” and items like “robot legs”, to pitch the best ideas for a new challenge (like this one).  

Bonus item: a big size “How to make a challenge” poster. See you in London!