From the 4th to the 18th of August 2017, the Game Changers programme will be taking another road trip. The destination? Malaysia.

Sylvester Arnab and Luca Morini will be travelling to work with the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak as part of the CreativeCulture (NEWTON) programme.

CreativeCulture (NEWTON) aims to expand the programme to address educational challenges within the context of inclusive learning for learners from the rural parts of Malaysia Borneo. It will involve collaborations with Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), where we will explore, exploit and experiment the impact of arts, design and culture in enhancing creative thinking and development in education (primary and secondary K12) through game design and computational thinking as an approach and instrument for fostering creative problem solving and transcultural practices in Malaysia. Art and Design are poised to transform our economy in the 21st century just as science and technology did in the last century. The CreativeCulture project is aligned with the inclusion of Arts in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education (STEAM), realising the potential of these subjects by enabling true innovation and new thinking through creativity. Art and culture boost creativity and creativity leads to innovation, new thinking and moving beyond existing skills; all together are triggers and needed in the social transformation. We thus need to allow for fun, playful, hands-on, socially and culturally grounded explorations of curricular topics during primary and secondary school to foster contextualised and deeper learning. In this project, creating games as a cooperative activity on the edge of the diverse fields of Art, Design, Culture, Science, and Engineering can be a fertile ground to cultivate these mind-sets and practices, and to provide a place for them to meet and learn how to fruitfully cooperate in a global setting (transcultural and transdisciplinary).

DMLL has recently received funding from NEWTON UK-SEA (AHRC + MoHE) programme to expand the impact of the GameChangers initiative into South-East Asia. The project is called CreativeCulture, which stands for ‘Creative and participatory transcultural practice and problem solving through game design and computational thinking’ and we are collaborating with Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) based in Borneo, Malaysia. This is one of the two new spin-offs of the GameChangers initiative.

The partnership will exploit existing expertise at the DMLL and UNIMAS, crossing various disciplines including game-based learning, design and computational thinking, creative economy, social informatics, pedagogy and cultural heritage. Innovative and industry-driven pedagogical approaches developed at the lab will be key to expanding the impact of the community participatory work UNIMAS has been spearheading in Malaysia, especially responding to the need to scale up quality and creative learning across the Malaysian Borneo.

The project was recently kicked off at the DMLL (14 – 17 February) in conjunction with the Remix Play Summit (15 Feb). We have had the pleasure to host Associate Prof Fitri Mohamad, Dr. Jacey–Lynn Minoi and Mr. Terrin Lim at the lab for the whole week, where they have been involved in the programme design sprint for the CreativeCulture programme. The DMLL team will be in Malaysia to conduct a series of workshop and small scale pilot in UNIMAS in August 2017.

More information regarding the trip will be released soon.