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Pre-school teacher, learning experience designer for virtual and face-to-face. Clara also trains instructors, coordinates projects and manages learning communities. She is particularly dedicated to gamification, escape room design, visual thinking, storytelling and digital and communicational skills. Her work happens in several learning institutions (INTEF, CAM, Telefónica, UCM, training centers…), in face-to-face settings and often about e-learning. She is focused on learning innovation and is constantly creating active processes to improve the quality and efficacy of teaching.
Clara writes and teaches virtually at AgoraAbierta, is the coordinator of the collaborative project No me cuentes historias… ¡Dibújamelas!, founding partner and communications coordinator of the community Gamifica Tu Aula and editor at Literatil. She is actively involved in the Asociación Espiral. Completely online.
Clara, as usual, does not have regular days! She designs experiences for learning, she teaches teachers, so she is constantly looking at things to showcase so they can pick up. It is very focused on being creative and having critical thinking. Also, there is some time spent on launching new courses and creating online content. Of course, she has a family as well to take care of, so there needs to come in some balance! She takes advantage of the fact that she is a freelancer to spend time with them.
She likes to say that she fails often and its the way to learn. It’s also a happy thing because, as in games, she has another chance! A recent fail she had is related to an escape room for teachers. Since she loves to work very hard on aesthetics because she feels it is the gateway to engagement. She failed several times on the physical materials and others. In particular, she failed in this class for teachers where instead of giving them the problems she gave away the solutions! She now likes to assume that there is chaos and it is all around, so it is better to embrace it for the best. Failing is, for her, the best way to learn because you need to attempt different perspectives until you arrive at success.
Clara now uses game thinking for a lot of things, it has provided great structure to her projects. One example is recent, when she had a talk about video games, and she is a gamer. It was about how games are useful for education and she used game thinking to structure her talk. It was used to engage the audience, it helped put the ideas in order, how to onboard the audience which was also the main point of the talk!
Her process starts with visualizing (or dreaming as she called it) the whole experience. She follows the five steps of design thinking and she iterates throughout the process almost on every step. She is very focused on details and on creating things with her hand, which might be due to the fact that she started as a kindergarten teacher! The key and also the problem to solve is to land her inspiration and ideas into the real world. Storytelling is also quite present in her designs.
A best practice would be, again, storytelling! As mentioned before she gives a lot of importance to visuals, which we could argue are also part of the theme and the story. Her favorite game is Assassin’s Creed, both Unity and Syndicate. There is great playability and also a lot of possibilities to explore the world. She would love to listen to Jose Altozano (Dayo), a journalist who is dedicated to video games. Her book recommendation would be Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Karl Kapp. Her superpower would certainly be perseverance! This is related to failing and trying again, to learning more and more and even on many different topics.
The random question this time is related to gamification and resource availability, listen to it by playing the episode!
Her final advice would be to listen to the audience and to play a lot! Also to improve your communication skills and think of the psychology around the solution and the users. We can connect with Clara on social media through Twitter @AgoraAbierta and on her web page agorabierta.com.
Quick summary of this episode’s links:
Guest Recommended : Jose Altozano (Dayo)
Book Recommended : Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Karl Kapp
Games: Assasins Creed ( Unity / Syndicate )
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Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,
Rob
