deepFUN.com | Bernie DeKoven

play, school, and intelligence

January 27, 2012

Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences has given rise to some remarkable insights and initiatives – almost enough to restore hope for the future of education. The following, from the conclusion of Playing with the Multiple Intelligences: How Play Makes Them Grow, a research paper by Dr. Scott G. Eberle, Vice-President for Interpretation at The Strong museum of play, published [...]

angry fun

January 26, 2012

I was talking with my friend of many years, Brian Sutton-Smith, (many years – he’s 87 years old now, and I’ve known him for about 50 of them) about The Well-Played Game. He was very excited about the book, impressed, even, at how I was championing games and fun. And, he added, what I was writing about [...]

Shakers and Shovers

January 25, 2012

Following the success of Toilet Paper Tug-of-War, I invented a more abstract version of the same basic theater game/exercise. This one more theatrical, but also focused on developing and sustaining a fragile relationship. There are two roles: Shaker and Shover. The Shaker is trying to get the Shover to shake hands. The Shover, to keep [...]

Toilet Paper Tug of War

January 24, 2012

In my earliest stages exploring what would become the Interplay Games Curriculum, before I discovered that children’s street and playground games were going to be the key to the soul of my work, I focused solely on theater games. I had had some wonderful experiences teaching kids improvisational theater and had hoped to bring similar joy [...]

healing games – a field report

January 23, 2012

I’ve been thinking about you and about play, and have appreciated your posts when I have time to explore them. You may be interested to know that yesterday I started another Social Confidence Games group at South High School here in Bakersfield with 9 students. 7 of them are socially anxious–a couple to an extreme [...]

Confluence (cont’d)

January 20, 2012

Confluence. Let’s try it again, shall we? You’re at a party. Everyone is having a simply marvelous time. Dancing, talking, nibbling, chatting, laughing, being everso amusing and amused, simply loving each other and themselves. You, on the other hand, are feeling out of it. They’re all so noisy, so self-involved, so insensitive to, well, you. [...]

Ninja Slap

January 19, 2012

I was first introduced to Ninja Slap at the DiGRA conference by the brilliant and extraordinarily playful inventors of Johann Sebastian Joust. It’s a bit slap-happy in a sometimes hand-stinging way, but I can assure you, it is well worth the minor agony. The rules, via Ultimate Ninja Combat 1. Players form a circle, each [...]

confluence

January 17, 2012

At the heart of the experience of coliberation there lies another experience, one that even more directly relates to the experience described by Dr. Celia Pearce as intersubjective flow - of being in flow with other people who are also in flow. Csikszentmihalyi explains that as we get deeper and deeper into the flow state, more and [...]

today I will dance

January 16, 2012

I was predictably curious about a post from Goodlife Zen called “how to have more fun in your life.” I found the advice terse, but worthy of heeding: If you’re considering how to change your life, having fun is an essential ingredient. Remember that ‘fun’ is not a static state of being. To have fun, we [...]

at play in the city

January 13, 2012

Thanks to Youtube, we have been fortunate enough to witness “urban happenings” like the Mercury Opera‘s performance in the Edmonton IRT and thanks to Penny McKinlay we are able to place gifts like this in their larger context. In her article Random Acts of Urban Playfulness, Ms. McKinlay points us to the Tenderloin National Forest where “Luggage Store Co-Artistic Directors/Artists [...]

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