Learning at Play with Kerry Whittaker and Matteo Menapace

Daybreak is a 2023 board game designed by Matt Leacock (designer of the hit game Pandemic) and Matteo Menapace. It's a cooperative game about fighting climate change in which players take on the role of various world powers implementing technological and social initiatives to decarbonize their energy production and build resiliency against the harms of a warming planet. The designers describe the game as "realistic, but not educational" in the sense that the mechanic and thematic elements of the game represent actual elements of the climate crisis without the game coming off as too didactic or preachy.

I've known for a while that games, particularly analog games, can be very useful as helping players understand complex systems and how they work. See my 2020 post about the healthcare policy game RePlay Health for an example of this. The impact of human activity on the climate is certain a complex system, and, given my experience playing Leacock's game Pandemic, I could easily imagine him designing a game that would help players understand that system. It was thus an easy choice for me to back Daybreak when it was being crowdfunded. Having now played the game a few times, I can attest that not only does it teach players about climate change and climate action, but it's a very good (and often very challenging) cooperative board game!

Earlier this year, I reached out to Matteo Menapace, one of the co-designers of Daybreak and someone who describes himself as "a very serious game designer" on his very playful professional website. We had a fascinating conversation about the design of Daybreak as a learning experience, and I shared that conversation with the Intentional Teaching Patreon supporters earlier this year. When I asked Matteo to direct me to educators who were using Daybreak in their courses, he pointed me to Kerry Whittaker, assistant professor of coastal and marine environmental science at Maine Maritime Academy. Kerry and her colleague Steven Baer developed a course on global environmental change in which they playtested early versions of Daybreak with their students.

On this week's episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast, I'm very excited to share both my conversation with Kerry about teaching climate action through Daybreak and my earlier conversation with Matteo Menapace about games and learning. Whether you teach about climate change and might use Daybreak in your courses or you're looking for a deeper understanding of how learning experiences can be designed, I think you'll find both of these conversations interesting.

​You can listen to my interviews with Kerry Whittaker and Matteo Menapace (or read the transcript) here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Epic Finales

In my conversation with Kerry Whittaker, I learned that her course has a final project but not a final exam, so she has her students play Daybreak as a class during her final exam period. That reminded me of a 2015 essay by Tony Crider, professor of astrophysics at Elon University, called "Final Exams or Epic Finales." Tony writes that ending a really fantastic course in which the students had become a real learning community with a high-stakes and high-stress final exam was deeply unsatisfying. He started replacing those final exams in some of his courses with class experiences he calls "epic finales," and in the essay he details what some of those experiences are like.

I highly recommend reading Tony's essay! The epic finale idea has stuck in my head since I learned about it, and Tony's work changed how I thought about the student experiences in my courses.

Teaching Moments in Professions of All Kinds

I'm looking for professionals to interview for a new book project on teaching moments outside of formal educational settings, like a doctor explaining a diagnosis to a patient. Do you know a professional who excels at teaching you hard things, someone who might be up for an interview? Maybe your tax accountant or home inspector or physical therapist or estate planner? If so, please send me a recommendation by hitting reply to this email.

Thanks for reading!

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