Icamp46

iCamp46, a short summary

After some months have passed, the time has finally come to reflect on the grand event that ran during the 46th week of 2013, iCamp46.

The purpose of the camp was twofold, on the one hand we wanted to strengthen the social network of our newly established school VID-Gymnasier, that contains both technical and business students. On the other hand, we wanted a new way to engage the students in the work.

At VID-Gymnasier we have Denmark’s only Game Development High School, GameIT, thus we have a lot of teachers from the game development business, and this gave us a unique way of looking at motivation.

What if we could establish a system of learning that was built around the same principles that we as game developers embrace, i.e. game based learning and gamification? We wanted our students to have fun while they were learning and the projects they were doing should entail meaningful learning. But having a great didactical model is only part of the mystery, clear goals and relevance is the key to good education that is easily assimilated by the students. To us this is where one of key features of the GameWise project comes into play, i.e. business relations. For us and our students it is very important that the work we do not only makes sense to ourselves but also to other people and that is why a relevant client or customer is very import in undertaking a project such as this.

In iCamp46 – 2013 the client we chose was the municipality of Grenaa, that had a city development project with funding at around 2 million euros, in which they needed different suggestions for how to create a city that is better suited for students.

To create such a system we teamed up with some of the best and most innovative teachers from around Europe to create the event we now know as iCamp46.

With La Salle and HKU as gamification and business relation consultants we managed to arrange a week where approximately 500 students created 80 different companies that each had a unique idea or take on how the municipality of Grenaa should use their money to better the educational environment in Grenaa.

The result was six projects that made it to an open City Council meeting where they presented their ideas to both politicians and local entrepreneurs, in a municipal wide effort to solve the problem.

The project is still running, and as of now, we are unsure of what will happen to student life in Grenaa, but we will know within the coming months.

More centrally, this project has helped the students at our school to create strong bonds between the different college directions and cultures, and thus this event will definitely have a recurrence in the coming years. Both to strengthen our internal bonds but also to strengthen the student focus on business relations.

Remember, iCamp46 now has a full-fledged Course Catalogue, enabling you to browse through the briefings, rules and presentation of the project from both runs (2013 and 2014)