The CUNY Games Network of the City University of New York is excited to announce The CUNY Games Conference 5.0, to be held on January 18, 2019, at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City.

R. Shane Snipes will be presenting a poster on Mindfulness, Technology, and Business Simulations.

In Fall 2018, BMCC’s Small Business & Entrepreneurship (SBE) 100 course used mindfulness interventions and the VentureBlocks.com simulation to increase student empathy for customer need, reduce student stress in interacting with new customers, and observing new potential business ideas based on customer interaction.

Pedagogically, mindful behaviors and access to useful teaching tech (EdTech) through games:

MINDFULNESS

• Agree to the purpose and hopeful outcome
• Pause to create “entry moment” for use of tech
• Reduced distraction (framed as “focus training”)
• Use in conjunction with www.FLIPDapp.co to manage & incentivize better tech usage

GAMING / VENTUREBLOCKS

• Customer discovery process & EMPATHY practice
• Teaching empathy in action / with a business purpose
• Foundational entrepreneurship knowledge/skill
• Healthy competition

Feedback

Students offered feedback on the game and the mindfulness (focus training). Which was most useful? [See Figure]:

A. Mindfulness (focus training and app) most useful.

B. Game most useful in learning the concepts of customer discovery.

C. Follow up on the simulation play the next class was most useful.

More about Games Conference  – This year, the CUNY Games Conference distills its best cutting-edge interactive presentations into a one-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities that faculty can use in the classroom every day. The conference will include workshops led by CUNY Games Organizers on how to modify existing games for the classroom, how to incorporate elements of play into simulations and critical thinking activities, as well as poster sessions, playtesting, and gameplay. For the digitally minded, we will also offer a workshop in creating computer games in Unity.

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