BUTE
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Department of Mechanical and Product Design
Industrial Product and Design Engineer
INTEGRATED PRODUCT DESIGN 5 COURSE
(CUP – SOART – BME – PUNTE cooperation)
Partners: Poly-Universe Ltd, Experience Workshop ay
Poly-Universe and STEAM tool research, further development cursus 25/02-20/05/2022
SUMMARY: This course was held to create STEAM education based creativity enhancing, community building games. The basis was the examination of games created by Hungarian and foreign game developers. The course was developed in collaboration with Experience Workshop, a Finnish education research lab, that experiments for years with these games and tools aiming to spread the practices of STEAM development. These games were Poly-Universe, Logifaces, Mondrian Blocks, 4D Frames (Mechatronics), LUX. The students researched topics of creativity, community building, marketing, game design and mechanics and STEAM education. These findings helped them to examine the given games and develop further versions, considering the CUP project’s needs and target groups. The research phase was the first phase of 3-4 weeks, then the ideation began. At the end of the 7th week the students showcased their (re-)design ideas and concepts. The second half of the semester consisted of developing these concepts even further in teams, based on the first half of the course. The individual idea generation work changed for a teamwork, where every team could choose a topic, like the boardgame, the digital-analogue game, the large scale team building game format and topics like storytelling. These six topics helped them orientate their initial ideas and concepts towards more complex solutions that could be directly applied to target groups and prompt usability for the CUP project and its use cases in diverse environments and locations.
STEAM education based creativity building community building logic game design description: In the Integrated Product Design 5 course of the Industrial Product and Design Engineer course at the Budapest University of Technology, students are assigned a redesign task according to the curriculum. In the spring semester of the academic year 2021/22, the extended teaching staff dealt with one of the most complex areas of the CUP project. The course brought together Several stakeholder participants, and potentially several offline spaces into which the Ne
w Buda project plans to transfer knowledge and build community. These two call words were the main focus of the spring course, complemented by the concept of STEAM education-based creativity development. Together with the students, the stakeholders explored the question: can creativity be developed through logic games, can it be achieved through a kind of integration of science and art, and can communities be built across the board? Is there a system of extended game mechanics that can make community engagement lasting and stimulating? In 2022, in an era of social media, unbroken popularity of board games and community challenges, our answer is yes. However, to answer the “How?” question, we spent 14 weeks exploring, shaping, testing and iterating on possible solutions. Trying out a number of well-known games (at home, on the subway, in dorms, in class) provided the experience that helped students build a kind of game evaluation know-how, both individually and as a team. The combination of education and entertainment (edutainment), by building community, helps to create creative groups, which can even self-organise to build on the mission of the CUP project, the Insert programme. They have a low entry threshold, are easy to learn, can increase the number of participants and guarantee a positive experience. Our Game Research Group has grown into a kind of informal lab, where game design and testing can be a routine part of a weekday classroom. The course welcomed back seven participants from previous CUP-BME collaborative courses. This allowed for the editing of a common arc, as not only the methodology, knowledge base and research/conceptual results of the previous courses were inherited by the new group of students, but also their senior knowledge and spokespersons. It is with their help that the most courageous course of the project collaboration has been realised so far. This course was realised after the strongest waves of the pandemic had subsided, giving the students the opportunity to gain direct experience of the material during the workshop, and thus to produce mid-fidelity prototypes that could be tested and tried out alongside a visual design, and which could be successfully presented and tested on a wider scale at the Bartók Festival in Újbuda in autumn 2022.
Students on the course: Adorján Csenge Borbála, Apró Noémi, Bálint Levente, Bitó Liliána, Égerházi Zsombor Árpád, Erdős Réka Krisztina, Faludy Kristóf, Frecska Viktória, Karosi Gábor János, Katona Dóra, Mező Csenge Jolánta, Nyist Anna Csenge, Pákozdi Borbála Rita, Pécsi Lilla, Slezák Viktória, Szlama Benedek, Takács Tamás Márk
The course is taught: Dr. Gábor Körtélyesi, Panna Petró, Kristóf Fenyvesi
Invited lecturers: Dániel Lakos, János Szász Saxon, Imre Kökényesi
