How can Collabyrinth be used with students?

1. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING: When Collabyrinth is used as part of a structured learning environment, students build collaborative problem solving skills.  

1. • The normal social dynamics between students are disrupted by Collabyrinth as there are no social hierarchies and there is no such thing as an individual "good" player - there are only pairs of players that work well together.  

   • The curricular structure for the use of Collabyrinth involves game play, reflection, strategy development, timed trials, and tracking emotional responses during and after play sessions.  

   • Collabyrinth gives a visceral understanding of what it means to work together in an environment where all contributors are equal.

1. DATA-RELATED STEM OUTCOMES:  Collabyrinth lends itself to the collection of data relating to real human interactions.  Data collection and analysis are easily tied to S.T.E.A.M. learning objectives.   

   • Check out this example of a rudimentary means to measure the collaborative growth between pairs of students.

3. DESIGN-RELATED STEM OUTCOMES:  When students design, build, and test their own mazes, they are addressing a well constrained yet equally liberating design problem.  

   • Their mazes must be true to the relevant physics (friction, gravity, elasticity, momentum etc.) yet a maze also has to be FUN!  

   • The coupling of physical constraints with subjective criteria  and the realization of a student-manufactured artifact of their own generative efforts is unique in education.  

   • Having students play mazes created by their peers gives a layer of objectivity in determining how entertaining and engaging a maze is in the same way that an educator can read an essay in order to provide feedback on writing style.  

4. CONNECTING STUDENTS:  Collabyrinth can be used to both disrupt and reform social connections among students.  

   • The experience of Collabyrinth requires some form of cooperation but how that comes about is up to the students as they play.  

   • Students who normally have little social connection can bond over a common problem and share in a common sense of success and the collective experience of growth and improvement.

Educator's Guide to Collabyrinth

Watch a video that summarizes the educational side of Collabyrinth below.

Watch a playthrough video of a maze created by grade 9 students below.

Below is the guided reflection playboard for the "Training Wheel" maze.