The Metaphor Game, 2006-2008, SMALLab learning scenario, developed by David Birchfield, Ellen Campana, and Sarah Hatton
During Fall 2007, we worked with a freshman literature class where SMALLab is currently installed at a local high school (check out the set up here). The Metaphor Game was developed by our team for the students during their poetry and Shakespeare unit. I helped lead this project.
The Metaphor Game is a learning activity developed for high school literature and creative writing students. It takes place in the SMALLab, where two people use the glowballs to catch floating media objects such as words and images and then drop them in a virtual bucket. Students must drop a pair of images, or a word and an image, or two words into the bucket and then describe a relationship between the two media objects in the bucket by creating a metaphor.
The curriculum spanned a nine week term so that students could think critically about metaphor. For their final projects, groups of four students worked in teams to find metaphors in Romeo and Juliet, the text they were focusing on in their class, and thus use those metaphors in their own version of The Metaphor Game. Students were able to come up with their own visuals as well to be used as media objects in their games.
Tools, scripts, software, equipment and ephimera:
the SMALLab system, original drawings, 2d text, Max/Msp/Jitter, Java
Publication on The Metaphor Game
The Metaphor Game was presented in the papers track at Siggraph Sandbox 2008. You can link to the paper here.
This image shows the two choices about to be dropped in the bucket
Students discuss which images or text they are going to try and compare so to make a new metaphor
Student art work for the metaphor game: visual representation of ripe
Student created art work for the Romeo and Juliet metaphor game: purple fountain = veins
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