Mindset Mashup is a card game created in collaboration with Riverdale Country School in uptown New York Growth to encourage their students to understand and develop a shared vocabulary around personal growth. As part of the Design-led Research class at the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons, the Mindset Mashup is the direct result of a philosophy of fast prototyping and "making as a way of thinking."
Similar to Apples to Apples, Mindset Mashup uses popular culture, literature and history to encourage creative thinking and imagination. Each player receives 5 character cards and 5 setting cards that they must combine into unique scenarios that best fit the growth mindset card for that round. With humorous combinations of characters in both relatable and extreme situations, students must grapple with highly complex and abstract concepts such as effort, perseverance, fear and inspiration. Through the subsequent debates and discussion around what card wins, they learn to verbalize and thus internalize how growth mindsets can be embodied in our daily lives.
I was the lead game designer of this project and produced all of the videos involved in it.
Growth mindset is the idea that intelligence and ability are not fixed but rather developed over time. Individuals with a growth mindset are more likely to demonstrate positive learning behaviors and attitudes such as embracing challenges, viewing effort and failure as valuable, and persisting even in the face of setbacks.
The design process
Our original mission was to foster meaningful discussions between parents, students and teachers that would reinforce the principles of a healthy growth mindset. Still, while we started creating taxonomies of the concept itself, we realized that the growth mindset should not only be discussed but deeply understood and remembered in daily activities.
With a new clarity in design objective, we set out to develop a set of activities that enable students to understand and develop a growth mindseth daily mindfulness. The key with growth mindsets is to have the concept so ingrained in the mind that spoting fixed mindsets and fighting them becomes second nature.
With our new objective in place we set out to devising a strategy for growth mindset habit creation amongst highschool students. We determined that our design solution should have three parts:
1) Spark ritual: a workshop to help set the ground work for what a growth mindset is. At this stage we are interested in stablishing the concept and differentiating from fixed mindsets.
2) Memento creation: this would be an object that would make the concept tangible and allow students to take it everywhere. It should, at the same time, be attractive and inspire a need for re-utilization.
3) Communications with parents: the object would then need to interact with teenagers at home, as a way to bring the discussion of growth mindsets to parents and siblings. Our hope is that this would expand the impact of our design.
For all of those stages, we were certain that our design solution should have two design principles :
* It should be funny and familiar.
To do that, we would make the most of pop culture and modern ways of communications - especifically, we would use gifs and video as a way to show (and not only tell) what a growth mindset is.
* It should be honestly playful and fun.
No hidden agendas here: students would know what we're trying to teach them, but we would also make a game that they could have true fun playing and that they could take home. Not only that, but the game's mechanic should encourage taking it back home.
The current prototype of the video. We are working on a more polished version, though it was very well-received by Riverdale students.
Our initial prototype had a very straightforward mechanic, which basically involved pairing up cards, and then telling a convincing story with them. There were two piles: the character cards, and the mindset cards, which were 8, 4 for fixed mindsets, and 4 for growth mindsets.
This prototype did not work correctly, though, as though the mechanics were familiar, the results were hard to create and the teenagers did not seem to have fun or be able to tell apart growth mindsets from fixed mindsets.
For our second prototype, we changed the rules to focus on growth mindsets only, and added a third card pile: a scenario card that encouraged creativity. Students were asked to make the most convincing story with their cards and then other players could choose the best one. Whomever wins gets to keep their cards.
This mechanic was simple enough, but we also added "You" as a character card, and encouraged students to take the game home (after much insistance from them, too!).
Mindset Mashup was given the Experiential Award by our Design-Led Research professors, Lisa Grocott and Mai Kobori, and recently received $1000 towards further rounds of prototyping and a final version for implementation in Riverdale School.
We are currently working on iterating the "You" cards to generate anecdotes more than just fictional stories from students, and we are exploring possible mechanics that can only be unlocked when playing from home.
Left to right: Estefanía Acosta (MA Design Studies), Andrea Morales (MFA Transdisciplinary Design), Laura Sánchez (MA Design Studies).
