Do you love playing board games? Have you ever wanted to make your own? With the support of the Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation, we created this DeCal where students will learn about the board game industry and design board games to create social change. Our DeCal provides the space for students to simultaneously explore their passions for social activism, innovation, and board game design. You won’t be bored!
The Board Game Design DeCal focuses on the design and development of board games for social impact. Creating games capable of influencing change in society allows students to create with a purposeful lens in mind, as they approach a problem at hand. Board Games can be effective tools to teach players important skills, such as empathy, privilege, and sustainability. Through this class, students will create a board game to tackle an important social problem in our everyday society.

The course goes through the importance of the board game industry, board game mechanics, developing concepts for board games, hands-on prototyping of games, testing board games on users, and learning about the Innovation Cycle, while focusing on creating art for social impact. For your final project, students will team up in groups of 4-5 students to develop a final project board game. At the end of the class, there will be a board game launch expo, where the class will play their peers’ games. And you will end the semester with a board game design that you can add to your personal design portfolio. By the end of the course, students will gain the ability to convey ideas and encourage discussion through design and innovation choices. Main requirements for the class are actively attend class and participate, have some design interest or experience, completing small homework assignments, and work on projects throughout the semester.

As part of the course, we highly recommend to get a Maker Pass for prototyping your board game final project! We welcome anyone with the desire to make board games!

Wednesday 4-6 PM, Jacobs 210

For enrollment, please fill out the online application below as soon as possible, preferably before January 30th, which is the first day of classes. Based on attendance at the first class and the application, we will select students to participate in the program. Priority consideration on application: January 30th, 2019 by 4pm Latest time to submit an application: January 30th, 2019 by 11:59pm We can only select 20 students due to limited space and constraints!