All posts by Carolyn Stallard

Save the Date: CUNY Games Conference 2021

Hello everyone,

We hope you are well. 2020 has thrown some curveballs, but that will not stop the CUNY Games Network from hosting its annual conference in January 2021. Please see below for details. Stay healthy, enjoy the holidays, and we hope to see you online on January 22nd.

SAVE THE DATE! 2021

The CUNY Games Network of the City University of New York is excited to announce The CUNY Games Conference 7.0, to be held fully online (and for free) Friday, January 22, 2021.

Rather than presentations, this time the conference will consist of idea exchange sessions held in breakout rooms and a handful of organizer-led workshops. The sessions will discuss interactive learning techniques, playful learning, design challenges, with a likely focus on how to adapt our best in-person activities for the online classroom. Therefore, no attendees will need to prepare a presentation—just be ready to listen and contribute your unique knowledge! The next day (Saturday) we will likely reserve to play together online tabletop and digital games and debrief their learning potential.

The CUNY Games Network promotes game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities faculty can use in the classroom every day. We aim to bring together all stakeholders: faculty, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and game designers. Both CUNY and non-CUNY participation is welcome—and completely free of charge.

Stay tuned for our schedule and more information.

Participants at the 2020 CUNY Games Conference designing a game.

Conference Photos Are Up!

On this lovely snow day, consider taking a moment to check out the photos from CUNY Games Conference 5.0, now available on Flickr. Click “Photostream” to view: https://www.flickr.com/people/115638344@N05/

In other news, the CGN inbox is feeling particularly void of blog submissions right now. Are you doing something interesting with game-based learning? If so, we’d like to read about it. If writing a full blog entry seems daunting, consider sending a couple sentences about a class idea, game, or resource you think our members would be interested in (even simple tips and tricks are fine). I’ll either feature these in one post or as a series if there is enough response.

Here’s one to kick us off:

Right now I am working on a mid-semester “escape the classroom” activity for my music survey course. One of my locks has four numbers, so I will provide a photo of many instruments with the words “Brass Percussion Woodwinds Strings” at the bottom. The students need to count the instruments in the photo and demonstrate understanding of instrument families to determine the correct combination to open the lock (7 brass, 4 percussion, 0 woodwinds, etc.). The entire activity will consist of small tasks like this, requiring some cleverness but a low degree of mental investment to plan. Perhaps I’ll write a longer entry on the result when it’s finished…hoping it is a success!


Are you interested in being featured on the CGN website? If so, submit a blog post or short paragraph on any topic related to GBL in higher ed., and/or send links/descriptions of your blogs to contactcunygames@gmail.com.