While work continues on the Empathy game, Miriam has started designing and executing the Growth Mindset game. The main focus of the game is to encourage risk taking, to show the player that just by throwing more effort on the problem isn’t going to solve it and to reward failure. Fear of failure can leave a person in a fixed mindset and it is also a tool to learn and adapt.

Instead of making it a digital game, this one will be a table top game that also incorporate co-operation, another psychological construct.

Two players work together in order to help a piece of clay become the human sculpture it always dreamed of being. They need to collect more clay and molds of the different human parts. At certain points the game forces the players to role a die in order to pass a checkpoint. But the die role is unbalanced: while players have a D6 die, the checkpoint might need a role of 4 to pass. This adds a feeling of high stakes but also incorporates an element of surprise – if the player loses they “win” another die! By that players learn that failure is encourage and so are risk taking.

Next week Miriam will continue to playtest the game and hopefully will get some feedback from teenagers.