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Reproduction of museum objects

October 2, 2013 in 3d Printing

 Why reproduce museum objects?

This project started in the stacks of the Wellcome Collection, when Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands discovered some of the things that Henry Wellcome collected into his giant collection of medical history – around 10,000 of the items he collected relate to sexuality and culture throughout history. They stretch from prehistory to Victorian times, and the sheer variety and strangeness of many of them is a window into parts of culture that the world doesn’t tend to record in the official histories.

The objects confront modern sensibilities quite powerfully. Like books, they are something like portals to the time they were made, and used, and understood.  The Sex & History project proved that engaging with this type of object can frame sex education classes in powerful and interesting ways, and bring real benefits to the educational value of those lessons.

However, the objects which that this framing turns on are also generally extremely fragile, singular, and live behind closed doors. They can’t be handled, except carefully, rarely, and with white gloves.

Many museums solve these problems using reproduction. Something like a quarter of the objects in the Natural History museum, for example, from dinosaur skeletons to fish fossils are reproductions, good enough that you get the same feeling from looking at them that you do from a ‘real’ object.

Given that you can’t take the pupils to the objects without vast expense, and the objects are too fragile to go to the pupils, bridging this gap with reproduction objects seems like a sensible way forward.

There’s a huge variety of objects that we could have chosen for test reproduction, but as this is only a small piece of initial R&D, we focused on the loop of 3d scanning and printing, and, as comparison of the original and reproduced objects was going to be key, we bought a couple of phallic amulets on ebay, so we could get a first prototype and sit originals and copies side by side.

How did we go about it?

Roman phallic amulet - about 2000 years old

This is a Roman bronze amulet – the two groups on Roman society which wore such amulets were small boys and Roman soldiers – hundreds of them are found buried in the soil in the sites of Roman military camps.

Currently, museum reproductions are mostly made using rubber or silicon moulds. However, the level of detail now available using 3D scanning is extraordinary and the price of that and 3D printing is coming down all the time. Scanning is a hands-off process which allows you to reproduce things too fragile or delicate for moulds, and can give an extraordinary level of fidelity – to the level that scratches and marks of use can be reproduced.

Stearite amulet

This may or may not be authentic, but stone amulets of this type have been found in tombs in China dating back to c1100- c 256 BC. This is made of stearite, which is what gives it that beautiful surface patterning. It’s shown with samples of laser sintered bronze and textured plastic.

We worked with scanning house Sample & Hold to scan both amulets as high resolutions scans.

Stearite amulet scanned

Printing Results

We 3d printed samples of both amulets in the closest possible material – laser sintered bronze and ‘White, Strong & Flexible’ from Shapeways.

Of the two, the bronze one came out looking already old. Although the printing resolution wasn’t high enough to precisely reproduce the incredible surface texture of the original, it felt old to people, and only required a little patination to feel exactly like the original object. The loop of scanning a bronze objects then reproducing it in the same material means that the weight and feel in the hand is perfect.

Small runs of up to three or four can be laser-sintered, but for any larger quantity it’s still more sensible cast from a master, whether that is the real object or a printed replica.

Roman bronze amulet reproduced

Old and new bronze amulets

Bronze phallic amulet reproduced

Stone turned out to be harder to reproduce. Everyone I found offering marble dust or a similar material is not doing it for the scale of fine detail we need. Various plastic prototypes could be patinated to look ok, but as soon as you pick them up, the handfeel is wrong.

Stone Chinese amulet reproduced via 3d printing

Stone amulet reproduced via 3d printing

In scoping future reproductions we’ll look for objects where shape rather than surface patina is the important part of it, as there’s a clear, simple route to reproduce physical objects by making digital copies when only shape is involved, whereas the kind of surface pattern reproduction needed for the stone amulet requires a level of hand finishing that puts it out of the reach of educational budgets.

This sample produces shape perfectly, but as soon as you pick it up, the weight is wrong

In future, reproducing larger runs of objects will turn back to moulds – the economics of scale mean that when you’re making a batch of more than a few pieces, that will always be financially more attractive. However, the 3d scanning process means that with particularly fragile or detailed objects, we get the kind of fidelity in the digital reproduction that is unimaginable any other way. Reproducing that fidelity physically depends on the resolution of the printer – for a truly fine reproduction in bronze, I’d need to find a much higher resolution printer, and probably commission a jeweller to hand finish the pieces.

Going forward though, we now have a good idea about what is easy and hard about digital model-making. We’ll work with the museums holding the objects to scan them digitally in the highest resolution possible, to future-proof that process.

It would then theoretically be possible to send copies to every interested school in the country, or give an accurate-looking reproduced object to every participant in the workshop, although that then raises new questions about whether multiple copies of an object can ever feel authentic in the same way as a singular one can.

Resources for reproducing small museum objects

3d scanning:

Sample & Hold

51-63 Ridley Road
E8 2NP

3d printing in Bronze

UK houses include

US site Shapeways is very userfriendly for beginners and delivers to the UK. Their tutorials are worth a look for beginners.

Free 3d software

Netfabb basic

Bronze reproduction via moulds and patination

Small sizes

Large sizes

A writeup at Edugames Hub

September 27, 2013 in Sophie Sampson

Look back to your school sex education with adult eyes, and you probably remember some poor teacher standing up in front of a class of giggling, scandalised or bored teenagers, teaching them how to put a condom on. Maybe a diagram of the uterus.

These days PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economics education), as it’s now called, goes much deeper into the territory of emotions and moral frameworks.

Edugames Hub has just published a short piece I wrote about the possibilities of using games in PSHE classes – read it here

Looking at your own society from outside

September 14, 2013 in 3d Printing, Objects, Process, Project description, Sophie Sampson

This is from an hour long talk I gave about the project at Pervasive Media Studios Lunchtime Talks series on Friday 13th September 2013. Kate and Rebecca weren’t able to attend, so this is very much a talk about the learnings from the project from a gamemaker’s point of view.

Looking at your own society from outside

I’m here with my game designer and producer hat on. I make games which do things, which prompt people to think differently or look at the world with new eyes.

You can see some of the previous projects I’ve worked on here – the threads that unite them are designing for people playing together in real life, rather than always and only looking at a screen, and a concentration on explaining history through games and game mechanics.

Some of the games I’ve worked on look like this:

PM Studio 2.003-001

But some of them look like this:

That’s a game called Battlefield, with no digital elements at all.

Our REACT funding

Kate Fisher, Rebecca Langlands and I received some money under the REACT Pump Priming fund to do a piece of R&D that extended work that Kate and Rebecca had been doing at Exeter, around framing sex and relationships education with historical erotic objects. We did some prototyping around using games and historical objects to frame PSHE lessons.

I’m going to talk a bit about the particular demands of PSHE, a bit about how games in particular work in the classroom, and a bit about historical objects and taking them into the classroom.

Getting to grips with PSHE

My memory of sex education in school can be summed up in one word: awkward.

I polled some friends on twitter, and they said things like

“I remember a dark room, awkward boys, then a bright flickering fluorescent light followed by biological diagrams”

“They did a talk attempting to scare us about STDs, did the condom and banana thing, then considered their duty done”

“Purely functional. No PSE/ responsibility stuff at all. BAD”

“I would have appreciated anything that made me feel like I wasn’t some sort of awful pervert, really”

It has an odd place in the curriculum. Most of my generation got a Biology teacher showing diagrams, possibly demonstrating how to put on a condom. Also, depending on what country you were educated in, perhaps the opportunity to put questions anonymously in a box and have the teacher go through them and lead a class discussion about issues raised.

This last is an example of othering – allowing pupils to ask personal questions in a way that does not feel like it’s about them, which is key to being able to break away from the strictly factual towards a more emotionally nuanced conversation, without too much risk to the individual. Framing something about others allows pupils to be braver in their questions.

The Educational goals of PSHE

To quote from Department of Education guidelines these include:

– learning the value of respect, love and care;

– exploring, considering and understanding moral dilemmas; and

developing critical thinking as part of decision-making

At secondary school level, sex and relationship education should prepare young people for an adult life in which they can:

– develop positive values and a moral framework that will guide their decisions, judgements and behaviour;

be aware of their sexuality and understand human sexuality;

– understand the arguments for delaying sexual activity;

– understand the reasons for having protected sex;

– understand the consequences of their actions and behave responsibly within sexual and pastoral relationships;

– have the confidence and self-esteem to value themselves and others and respect for individual conscience and the skills to judge what kind of relationships they want;

avoid being exploited or exploiting others;

– avoid being pressured into unwanted or unprotected sex;

– access confidential sexual health advice, support and if necessary treatment;

– know how the law applies to sexual relationships.

The educational goals and curriculum requirements for PSHE have moved on quite a lot since my generation was at school watching someone put a condom on a banana. It’s a mix of factual learning “understand the reasons for having protected sex” “know how the law applies to sexual relationships”, and much more touchy-feely emotional development:

“respect, love and care”, “respect for individual conscience and the skills to judge what kind of relationships they want”, “avoid being exploited or exploiting others”

Most important for this project are the paragraphs at the end of the document:

It is essential that schools can help children and young people develop confidence in talking, listening and thinking about sex and relationships.

Teachers and other staff may need to overcome their own anxieties and embarrassment to do this effectively.

Partnership between school and parents is the key to success.

That directive to develop confidence in talking, listening and thinking about sex and relationships is exactly where this project is situated.

What PSHE is trying to do is insert answers into pupils’ brains that they can draw on in risky situations. There is factual information to impart, but there is also a strong sense that pupils have to develop their own deeply felt moral frameworks, which requires a certain depth and sincerity of discussion to achieve.

That’s not simple in a school environment, with all the constraints built in. It’s really easy for pupils to put up a barrier between themselves and what they are being told, in classic kid ways.

These are some quotes from the evaluation we did with 17 year old students at Exeter College about their previous PSHE, putting up those barriers in different ways:

[D] I got banned from sex ed.

[C] Why?!

[D] The boys…they exploded a condom at the back of the room

[E] I got a C on my sex education test.

[D] You did a test?! We just got taught that you shouldn’t use crisp packets or plastic bags as condoms [laughs]

[A] The session here…it was all about protection and ways of preventing being pregnant and stuff

[B]It was just contraception really, more than anything

[A] I think in that one though, everyone just sort of took the attitude that i’ve already heard all of this, I’m not really going to listen sort of thing

[D] The videos we got played, they were hilarious.

[B] One thing I didn’t like about it in school is that people took it so, like, immaturely…no offence but I always used to get quite pissed off. I was always quite interested, and people used to sit there and giggle and it was…

[C] It was funny though, it’s funny when you hear about it, think about it. Like you get told all this rubbish, that you were brought by the stork or whatever (laughs) but then you find out actually your dad’s genitalia has been inside your mum, it’s weird

The problem of trying to affect people’s moral framework when the material you’re presenting feels like it’s not ‘for them’ is a thorny one. Channel 4 have gone a long way towards solving it with the Sex Education Show, which is classic risky, on the edge Channel 4 stuff, with live video links to nude people of different shapes and sizes, and segments which get groups of parents watching internet porn and showing live images of STDs, surrounding the calm and cheerful message that all this stuff is both normal, and easy to protect yourself from. It clearly puts itself on the side of teenagers a way it would be difficult for teachers to emulate in the classroom, and many of the pupils we asked cited it as one of the main places where they got their actual sex education from in practice.

I started to understand the problem of PSHE differently when I came across this quote from neuroscientist Gerald Edelman:

“The metaphor of a brain as a jungle is much more appropriate than the metaphor of the brain as a computer”

It has relevance to the job that PSHE is trying to do.

This is the best picture I could find that sums up the undercurrents in a class of kids:

Breakfast Club social groupings

Those labels skew American, but teenagers the world over are working out who they are and how they’re going to be. Kidworld comes with a constant jockeying for position, it contains pressures and embarrassments that adults have been largely happy to forget. It’s a harsh, status-obsessed place, where social pressure builds up and often directly contradicts what adults presenting as good and bad.

Brian Sutton Smith writes in his book The Ambiguity of Play:

“The adult public transcript is to make children progress,

the adult private transcript is to deny their sexual and aggressive impulses;

the child public transcript is to be successful as family members and schoolchildren, and their private or hidden transcript is their play life, in which they can express both their special identity, and their resentment at being a captive population.”

He writes combatively here, but he is right, and healthy children and adults negotiate the differences between these transcripts effortlessly. The adult private transcript is a perfectly fair one, if you examine it. We want to live in a society where people are able to curb their sexual and aggressive impulses, it’s part of the implicit bargain of society.

( As adults we raise our eyebrows at the idea of schoolchildren being a captive population because we have so internalised the lessons of school, but when the gift of compulsory education was first given to children in Europe, many of them rioted. It takes some getting used to. )

But this is what school does, apart from merely teach facts and techniques for manipulating them. It socialises children into responsible members of society. It’s mostly great at that, but PSHE falls right on one of the seams between the world of being a good pupil, and the messy, status grabbing, adult-rejecting world of Kidworld.

Public Transcripts

Public transcripts can be satisfied with diagrams, and facts, but we must acknowledge that when we want the lessons taught in PSHE to be put into practice, it’s in situations which look more like this:

PSHE needs to infiltrate the private transcripts of kidworld in order to make a genuine difference, to get deep inside people’s moral frameworks, and it needs to do it ethically.

Kids develop ways of keeping adults out of kidworld from a very early age – any teacher will recognise the ripple that goes across the class of giggling, messing around, jokes and teases at the expense of those in authority, when the group doesn’t want to listen for whatever reason.

This, finally became the big question that this piece of R&D looked to answer:

Given the constraints of public and private transcripts, how do you facilitate genuine and nuanced discussions with teenagers about society and the things they care about?

PSHE through games and objects

I met Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands through the REACT programme – they’ve been grappling with these questions through the lens of history. Their subject is historical erotic objects and the meanings modern people put on them. With their Sex and History project, they have hit on a great way of othering, which is framing PSHE lessons around historical erotic objects

We got interested in the potential of games to also do this. People lose themselves in playing, they have plausible deniability because they’re ‘just following the rules’.

I’ll introduce some of these objects as Kate and Rebecca introduced me to them. You have to imagine us sitting in a cafe in Exeter, having lunch and discussing what a potential collaboration might look like. They whipped out some A4 glossies to show me.

These are 19th century chinese, and the right size to fit nicely in your palm.

Historical erotic objects

Inside, they look like this:

(c) Wellcome Images

So of course, I asked, well what were they used for, why were they made? And their answer was “what do you think they were used for?” Because, in common of many of these objects, there is little to nothing in the official history books about them. It’s thought that they might have been given to brides as an educational tool, but historians don’t agree on this point. Maybe they were just for good luck, or something else.

And by asking what do I think they’re for, I’m put on the spot which makes me actually run through scenarios in my head, and try and imagine a society that produces such beautiful, unusual objects. I really look at them.

Here’s a couple more:

Historical erotic objects

The vessel on the left is of a type found in the graves of a particular South American tribe. There are no written records of why they made so many of these, and put them in the graves of men, women and children. Was it about resurrection? Did they, as one historian has argued, think they were funny?

The garden gnome – well, I had no idea before I started this project that Roman daily life had phallic imagery everywhere. Often with bells on. Often with wings on. I had no idea because it’s not part of the life we talk about officially. When we write history for public consumption, we tend not to include this stuff. For many years, guidebooks to Pompeii have been dismissing the phalluses everywhere as brothel markers, if they talk about them at all.

So all that sounded super interesting, and was clearly something I wanted to investigate further.

Games in the classroom

The particular things I thought games might add to this project are these:

How games might help

When people are playing games they feel empowered to do and say things they’d never do in ‘real life’

Game space is one where, within limits, people divest themselves of their regular personalities – so much that is not acceptable in normal life is encouraged when playing some kind of game. Trash talking, deviousness, going all out to win, screwing over your fellow competitors entertainingly. You can get away with acting like a terrible friend when you’re playing croquet.

So, we looked at the activities they had previously tested in the Sex and History project, and with Simon Katan, we put together several prototypes which used games and objects in different ways to start the type of conversations we were looking for.

Simon and I also looked at learning objectives and success criteria for a PSHE activity. A prototype should always answer a specific question, after all.

Conversation pieces - learning objectives

We also need to establish what success will look like, so that we have a benchmark for evaluating our activities:

Conversation pieces - success criteria

So, the games themselves. One asked the class in small groups to create ads for the objects we gave them, specifically to advertise them as if to the society they were made for. They needed to think their way into the shoes of those people, and there was a voting system which asked the groups to vote on which they thought the entire class would find most convincing.

We gave them objects like this anti-masturbation device:

Victorian device

And these Roman lamps:

Roman Lamps

We also prototyped a card game about Chinese concubines which asked all the pupils (boys and girls) to play as concubines, trying to gain power by putting down other concubines, gathering the support of eunuchs, and scheming to get their own child elected as the next emperor.

Concubines card game

This looked to use the game rules to model a historical society as a way of getting pupils to step outside their own world, and think about how those rules and constraints affected the decisions they were making.

Both were surrounded by discussion. For the first, we let the class introduce the objects to each other, then led a discussion about what the societies that produced those objects must have been like. For the second, we introduced the class to objects, images and testimonies from real eunuchs and concubines to bring alive the world. We showed tiny shoes for bound feet, images of some of the 19th century eunuchs serving the empress, and testimony from the last surviving court Eunuch, who remembers when there were hundreds more candidates than were able to get positions at court.

Afterwards, we again asked the pupils to discuss what seemed strange to them about that society that they’d just stepped into. Brilliantly, they themselves did a really good job of then turning the discussion around to look at what people a thousand years ago would feel about their own society, what they’d think was strange. Which is exactly what we’d hoped they would do.

Was there a difference between using historical objects and using games?

In evaluation, I felt there was remarkably little difference in effect between sessions that were framed by objects, and those that were framed by a game. Both served as strong devices for othering, for triggering strong thinking about society that could be turned round to self examination without much danger of becoming too personal. In fact when the games were about the objects themselves, it felt redundant. Too much. They are both fairly powerful framing devices, and the path of objects which introduced the world of a game as real, then a session of play, felt like the right way forward.

How games work in the classroom

I also spoke to as many teachers as I could about teaching PSHE, and what they need out of classroom activities, and realised what different conditions I’m used to as a game maker. I’m used to relying on the rules of a game to control chaotic situations.  The image below is a group of people playing Hide&Seek‘s Battlefield, a playground game designed for 7-11 year olds which is run by a single person holding a piece of paper with a ruleset on. From the outside, it looks like total chaos – everyone is running and throwing beanbags at each other, and probably shouting at the tops of their voices. Because I’m aware of how the game fits together, I know that the shouting is people trying to improve their team strategy on the fly, and because both teams have a goal and the game is robust and well balanced, I know there’s a predictable end to the game and a constructive reason to be running and screaming (although when playing with small children you need good policing to prevent cheating).

PM Studio 2.023-002

They are actually refighting the Battle of Hastings – one side are told they are Norman knights, trying to invade and steal the treasures of England. The other side is the English defenders: footsoldiers and longbowmen. The different soldier types are simulated with different rules and actions, and the battle is balanced so either side has a roughly equal chance of winning. So replaying it sets up an alternate history, but it’s a brilliant way in to finding out about a long-ago battle.

Every one of the children who had a discussion about the Battle of Hastings and then re-enacted it in this way felt ownership of that piece of history. I suspect I could come back to them now two years later and ask them about it, and they’d have something to say about the Norman Conquest and the difference between knights and longbowmen.

However, I know from playtesting this game in primary schools that this amount of running and screaming is not something that teachers are comfortable with, or neccessarily feel is helpful to learning, and I have a lot of sympathy with why. Teaching children how to be still and learn is one of the main unspoken goals of primary school, and it is a lesson that needs to be constantly reinforced if it’s going to stick. Boisterous excitement is something run off at break, it’s something that has a place on the sports field, but it constantly threatens to disrupt lessons.

So the question remains:

Why are educators so interested in games?

With my outsider status as a game maker doing a research project comes the chance to ask lots of stupid questions and really interrogate what’s going on. And I ended up asking a lot of questions around what traits of a game might be desirable or undesirable in the classroom. There’s a big movement at the moment which is looking at how to use games in schools successfully, and it possibly involves being clear-eyed about what games are and how they work.

I came to the conclusion that educators are really interested in qualities of games to attract attention and engagement. Museums and broadcasters have had great success with games that help people learn. It’s one of the things that made me want to be a game designer, the realisation that some games help you understand things in a depth that it’s difficult to achieve with other patterns of pedagogy. You know things in your gut about a system that you’ve played with and found the breaking points of over and over again.

My own personal epiphany came from this game:

PM Studio 2.025-001

That’s a screen from Civilization, a game I have given hundreds of hours of my life to. For the uninitiated, this is a game which simulates leading a civilization from first Bronze age settlements to building spaceships to settle on other planets. It’s full of intricately interlocking systems around scientific, cultural, military and manufacturing developments, and playing well involves making a series of many hundreds of hard decisions about what to focus your society’s resource on.

I mention it because around the time of the first Gulf War, when I was both young and politically naive, the idea that the war might be in part about securing our oil supply felt like the most shocking and cynical political decision our government could make. And yet, and yet. In Civilization, I had invaded to secure an oil supply hundreds of times, because at the point of the game where it becomes necessary, it becomes REALLY necessary, and you risk your neighbours crushing you out of existence if you don’t have any. I started my first games as a player who valued science over might and never built any armies, but as my neighbours invaded over and over again, I learned that I needed to balance both in order to survive to build a spaceship.

I found I could apply the models I’d learned in the game, for all they are simplified models, to real world political and economic situations, and understand them better. Forcing you to make hard decisions in worlds that are not your own is something games can do brilliantly. Another example is Papers Please, a game where the player is a border guard checking passports at a border crossing in an Eastern European-ish country at war.

Papers Please

You have a giant book of rules and exceptions, and a constantly changing requirements sheet, and are working against the clock to check through as many people as possible, so you get paid more, without letting anyone through incorrectly, for which you’ll be fined. At the end of the day you go home and work out how to budget your pay to feed your family and heat your home. The normal things. It’s bleak decision after bleak decision – do you let the wife follow her husband through even though she has the wrong stamp in her passport, knowing another fine will mean someone in your family won’t eat tonight? Do you let through the pimp, knowing he’s conducting human trafficking but his papers are in order?

High Tea was a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust and Preloaded, a game in which you play an independent British smuggler, selling opium in China’s Pearl Delta. Buy cheap and sell high to make a profit which you can spend on tea to keep Britain happy. It is inevitable that, as you maximise profits in order to do well in the game, you contemplate what you’re doing to create and protect that profit. It’s a subtle game whose message creeps up on you, and Wellcome published a full evaluation of it here.

High Tea Preloaded Wellcome

So these are all examples of ways learning can be stimulated, but there’s no doubt that games in classrooms are still controversial. Whether it’s rhetorics around frivolity, or control, or simply doubts over their educational value, although games have their classroom advocates, they are often drowned out by other voices.

It’s the kind of ambiguity and controversy that, if it came up in a playtest, would mean that more understanding and design work needs to be done. So, I looked deeper at classrooms, and the design constraints they require.

Like policing, classrooms are a consensual hallucination. Classrooms are founded on rules, just like games are. But also, they are a bargain between pupils and teacher, where the teacher asserts that these things you are learning will help you in later life. The public transcript is worthwhile.

Some of the rules of a classroom include:

1) sit still

2) pay attention to what the teacher says

3) speak when asked to do so

4) contribute to class discussion

5) do set homework or fail

6) feedback comes through answering questions, and on homework

7) failure has consequences outside the classroom

Whereas the meta-rules of play are something like:

1) success in a game comes through modelling the system in your head, then testing those assumptions

2) actions will have consequences inside the game,  but not outside

3) failure is encouraged as a method of modelling the system, and will come with feedback to help you get better

4) actions that could be deemed agressive outside the game are acceptable within it

5) winning will have social consequences outside the game – ie, you’re allowed to brag about winning a game in the way you can’t brag about say doing well in a test, because failure has no consequences outside the game.

Huizinga wrote quite pointedly in Homo Ludens:

“Play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be a forcible imitation of it.”

Written in 1938, Homo Ludens is subtitled ‘an examination of the play element in culture’. And there are lots of ways in which he’s right. A teacher standing up in front of a class brings certain assumptions, one of which is that if you don’t follow their directions, there will be sanctions, and being sanctioned for not playing well enough is a mindboggling concept when you start thinking about it. It becomes impossible to relax into a game in the way you would if you had voluntarily decided to play.

Games do give you engagement and absorption, but the specific techniques games use to produce that absorption aren’t neccesarily great for a classroom environment. To run through a few fundamental characteristics of games and play and examine them individually:

Heightened Concentration

That state of heightened concentration that game players have is produced by the collision of several things, but the first is feedback loops. Game systems are set up so that every action results in feedback. When you complete a line in tetris, it doesn’t just disappear, but it flashes for a second to show that yes, you did the thing you were supposed to do, and now enjoy your reward. In poker, when you win a hand, there’s the tactile reward of a pile of chips pushed towards you, and the joking comments of the other players, and the sudden freedom to play more wildly if you like.

Cycles of tension and release

Huizinga wrote “Tension is a part of play; uncertainty, chanciness, a striving to decide the issue and so end it’. Every game works on tension and release. You’re given knowledge of how to win, and the opportunity to try something to do so. As a player you take an action not knowing at first if it will come off or not, and in that uncertainty is fun.  There is some of that in classrooms, but the cycles tend to be much longer, and real life rarely, if ever, has a defined win state. Exams and graded papers are the closest school gets, but again, failure has consequences.

Brian Sutton-Smith perhaps said it best: “In all games, it is very important that the player should be able to boast of his success to others”. Not cool in the classroom, once you’re over the age of ten or so.

Repetition is rewarded

Repetition does seem to be an alignment between what games provide and what teachers want – everyone needs to repeat things to learn them, and the constant joyful repetition is what helps learning through games settle so deep in your gut. But classroom repetition should stop when something is learnt, because class moves on.  Again, contrast this to the rising system, where repeating an action that’s intrinsically fun and getting feedback and release makes you want to do it again and be disappointed when you are forced to stop, unless you come to the final tension and release of the end of the game.

Ambiguity has less place in school than in adult life

Play is, by its nature, ambiguous, especially to someone who isn’t engaged in it. Play fighting and fighting look the same from the outside, even if in the former someone getting hurt would stop the play immediately.

Ambiguity is something that is worked up to in schools as pupils become ready to take a more sophisticated view of a subject. Take Physics. When you get to university, you find out that Newton’s Laws of Motion, which you were taught at GCSE, don’t apply as universally as you may have been given the impression. Strictly speaking, Einstein’s work disproved them for anything close to the speed of light, but they work well enough for the physics you do in school – measuring the force of gravity from a pendulum, or travelling from the Earth to the Moon, say. It gets you far enough.

The scientist I asked about this said, “Everything you are taught in school physics assumes everything is made of matter and energy, and it turns out they’re the same thing. Doing a physics degree involves having your conception of reality entirely shattered and rebuilt on about a fortnightly basis.”

So, can a compulsory game be fun?

Yes – people get a lot of pleasure out of sports and rituals, but fun isn’t the most important reason they are conducted. Not everyone enjoys them, by their nature. Participation in both sports and rituals becomes smaller and confined to a self selecting group in adult life.

But inside classroom, if I can generalise, teachers feel supported by a game activity when nobody loses themselves in play. We want educational play to take place at one remove. We want its participants to be examining their feelings and responses, and acting a little like game designers. The best possible outcome is if they start looking at the rules they are playing under, and wondering what would happen if they changed them.

So, that probably isn’t the right question. Can a compulsory game support learning is a better question.

My new design rules for games to be used inside the classroom

1) Dial down the ecstasy and joy

2) Dial down the tension and release

3) Design a lesson, not just a game. (this is really important – the game is there as a stimulus to the conversation, not the other way round. It’s a framing device and needs hooks within it to hang the discussion on.)

4) use games to model a system, not reward reading (though I kind of knew this already – a lot of low quality educational games are just any game reskinned to deliver factoids at appropriate times. Not cool guys.)

So games can be used in the classroom, but as a game maker, I need to change my expectations and design goals considerably to suit this situation.

Using historical objects in the classroom

Having done this piece of R&D, the conclusion I came to is actually that the game and the object are both acting in the same kind of way. Both are performing othering, leading to discussion, but in a single activity, you don’t need both at the same time, although the one can lead to the other powerfully, as they did during the Concubines lesson.

There is a problem with the objects though – they live here:

Blyth House

This is where the Science Museum (who currently have custody of most of Wellcome’s physical objects) store their collections.

It’s possible for schools to arrange visits there occasionally, but that’s certainly not a scalable solution – they’re busy and the rooms are small. The objects can’t be sent out to schools – they’re fragile, singular, and some of them are thousands of years old.

Luckily, tech has solved this for us. Models have a long history in museums. Something like a quarter of what’s on display at the Natural History Museum, for example, is reproduction, reproduced well enough that the objects have the emotional charge of the real thing.

We decided to look into 3d scanning and printing and see where it might get us – the price and accessibility is coming down the whole time, and it’s an intriguing area to look at. Currently most copies of objects are made through silicon and rubber moulds. It’s inexpensive, but risks damaging fragile objects, and the fidelity isn’t great, whereas with 3d scanning you can pick up every tiny crack, chip and usage mark.

We worked with a great 3d scanning house, Sample and Hold in Hackney.

They were originally going to come with us to the museum, but it proved difficult to schedule, and we wouldn’t have been able to go back with the models and do a direct side by side comparison, so I turned to ebay. It turns out there’s is a roaring trade in historical erotic objects on ebay. Who knew?

They are often found by metal detector fans near roman military camps, because the two groups in Roman society who wore bronze phalluses around their necks are Roman soldiers and preadolescent boys.

searching for historical erotic objects on ebay

However, they don’t just come out of the ground in the US, where there is an equally keen base of collectors, so prices there are higher, and there are clearly shadowy figures buying up phallic amulets on UK ebay and reselling them for higher prices on the US site. But I digress.

Eventually, after weeks of being sniped, I managed to buy two contrasting amulets, one Roman bronze, one Chinese and made of stearite. I took them down to Sample & Hold, and they were rendered beautifully into ones and zeros.

3d scanning a phallic amulet

And we made some first prototypes, to get a feel for what we could and couldn’t expect from the process.

reproducing Roman bronze amulet

Laser-sintered bronze is now widely available, and this reproduction feels successful. The surface of the 3d printed object isn’t as beautiful, but a jeweller can cheaply patinate it with fake verdigris, and the weight and hand feel are perfect.

PM Studio 2.049-001

The Chinese stearite was a much larger challenge, and ended up being outside the scope of a project looking to make inexpensive reproductions for use in schools. I couldn’t find anyone printing with marble dust or anything in this small size, only on an architectural scale, and so the model above is in Shapeways’ Strong White – it’s too light in the hand, and I could get an artist to reproduce the beautiful surface markings, but only for a couple of hundred pounds. This led me towards reproducing objects which rely on their shape, and can be printed in something close to their original materials. The South American ceramic vessels should come out quite well, for example, by this method.

Final Conclusions

In this short piece of R&D, we didn’t design robust, finished lessons, but the route to them is clear.

The evaluations clearly showed that the class surprised themselves with their level of engagement:

[B] it was the fact that people were joining in the discussion that surprised me, like it turned from a talk about something, a talk about the sexual artifact we were looking at into, like, modern issues, and everyone actually gave their opinion.

[A] Yeah, I think people spoke about things that they wouldn’t normally talk about without realising it…so that, but then, so it was easier, which meant they were obviously comfortable talking about it, but I don’t think they realised until everyone else kind of joined in

[B] Because, yeah, it didn’t feel like a sex ed thing

They didn’t indulge in the behaviour we examined at the start, where pupils act up to put a barrier between themselves and the lesson.

[B] it was the fact that people were joining in the discussion that surprised me, like it turned from a talk about something, a talk about the sexual artifact we were looking at into, like, modern issues, and everyone actually gave their opinion.

[A] Yeah, I think people spoke about things that they wouldn’t normally talk about without realising it…so that, but then, so it was easier, which meant they were obviously comfortable talking about it, but I don’t think they realised until everyone else kind of joined in

[B] Because, yeah, it didn’t feel like a sex ed thing

Kids even talked to their parents about what they did in their sex education class:

[SJ] Did you discuss any of this with your friends or family?

[B] I talked about it with my mum.

[A] We was discussing it as a tutor group, afterwards.

[B] Yeah we did, didn’t we? Yeah, like, I’m really close to my mum so I said to her, you should have seen some of the weird stuff we saw today…because it’s quite weird, I mean you don’t expect to see it…because I wasn’t expecting things like this anyway, I was like, that’s a bit strange. She just thought it was really funny.

Several weeks later, they had intimate recall of what they’d done and seen in the class, and could talk in detail about the objects and activities. To go back to our list of success criteria:

We’re getting it right if we:

1. Create an inclusive environment in which both shy and confident students can express their ideas and feelings.

2. Create a safe space removed from students’ personal world in which they can describe their concerns and experiences with a degree of plausible deniability.

3. Bridge the gap between pedagogical treatment of PSHE and everyday teenage realities.

4. Raise awareness of social issues to do with sex and gender.

Not everyone spoke out in the lessons we ran, but the majority did, and the class as a whole appeared to be very engaged. The othering leading to a safe space appeared to work well – the classes discussed topics from removal of pubic hair to the stigma around pedophilia with an air of comfort, and appeared to be making new connections and thoughts around those subjects.

Much of the discussions focussed on gender and power issues as they affected the daily lives of the class, and there is clearly more to bring explore around these subjects. PSHE is especially seeking ways in to having conversations around the availability of internet porn, and this could be a way in which is much easier on pupils and teachers than most.

So what’s next?

Kate and Rebecca’s wider Sex and History project will of course continue. This particular portion clearly has further to run, and we’ll be seeking further funding to push forward to some robust, well tested game designs in the context of lessons, and do further testing within classrooms.

I’m keen to continue to explore the idea that games can help develop an understanding of distant and historical cultures. In particular how they can prompt thinking and conversation around the moral issues that making hard decisions in the course of a game raises. This piece of R&D has shown that this is effective, particularly with teenagers, and we have only scratched the surface of its possibilities so far.

Games for sex education, really? Why?

May 19, 2013 in Process, Sophie Sampson

Working out what success would look like was an important early step. I started this project because I believe games can be helpful in producing the kind of learning you know in your gut rather than just learn for a test. Conversation Pieces is a brilliant chance to trial that in one of the most potentially awkward classes in the school curriculum.

So, the list we came up with to test game treatments looks like this. As designers, we will have succeeded if the lesson does the following:

  • Creates an inclusive environment in which both shy and confident students can express their ideas and feelings.
  • Creates a safe space removed from students’ personal world in which they can describe their concerns and experiences with a degree of plausible deniability.
  • Bridges the gap between pedagogical treatment of PSHE and everyday teenage realities.
  • Raises awareness of social issues to do with sex and gender.

Note that we’re using lesson as the unit, rather than game. Designing a game specifically for use inside a classroom carries quite different needs from something digital available on the web, or something kids will access outside school. It carries expectations of form, that classroom roles will be somewhat respected, and also that it will be surrounded by interpretation and discussion.

This is important because school lessons are a place where pupils get help to unpack ideas – they’re learning those skills of interpretation and abstraction that adults take for granted. The value of this activity is contained in teenagers having honest conversations about the things which worry them, in an environment where their preconceptions can be challenged. We’ve all been teenagers, we remember the self-reinforcing nature of peergroups, the way mis-information can be taken as truth. Part of what you learn at that age should be how to question information sources, the importance of disbelief, and looking outside your own experience.

So, there’s a game, that sits inside the structure of a lesson. The purpose of the game, like the purpose of the objects, is to frame the lesson in a context that’s not about anyone in the room. It’s about distant times and places. When game structures are right, when the historical objects are introduced in the right way, the class gets to step outside itself. By trying to put themselves in the place of people in a society with completely different rules and norms, the kids get to look at their own society from the outside, and examine and discuss things which are genuinely important to them.

Ebay for beginners

February 14, 2013 in 3d Printing, Objects, Sophie Sampson

I keep being sniped. Having decided that the very best way of prototyping would be to own an object so we can make direct, side by side comparisons with copies we make, I’ve turned to ebay to buy a Roman phallic amulet for the duration of the project.

Another lost ebay auction

It turns out that in this country at least, they’re pretty common, there are two or three a week on ebay, sold by metal detecting enthusiasts or general dealers in antiquities. Almost no one claims to specialise in such objects. But the bidding on them is fierce, and I keep being outbid by someone, to the point I’m considering abandoning principle and resorting to software. It’s got personal.

But this process has scratched the surface of a whole hidden ecosystem. The amulets are relatively common because apparently Roman soldiers wore them around their necks daily, and lost them as they marched all over this country two thousand years ago. Metal detectors turn them up occasionally, along with WW2 bullets and Victorian costume jewellery and Georgian pennies. One of the glorious things about the internet is that it’s possible to get little windows into other worlds, and the need to identify corroded finds means that metal detector fans are enthusiastic forum users, with a private vocabulary of ‘permissions’ (fields where they have the landowner’s permission to detect), FLOs (government Finds Liaison Officers) and the pleasing litany of model names. It’s a hobby which rewards persistence unevenly – you might find a roman coin or a diamond ring your first time out, or go weeks and months with nothing more than 1ps and tin cans.

But that persistence means that a steady stream of lost and abandoned pieces of metal is being painstakingly taken back from the earth, and cleaned up and shared. But then what do you do with it all? If you have the passion and an understanding wife, you end up with a collection of thousands of pieces of corroded metal, or you send it to ebay to see if you can make back some of what you paid for your gear.

And so the phallic amulets are bought and sold. Often they go to America where prices are higher because they don’t just come out of the ground in the New World like they do on our congested island. And then what? These ebay auctions are run as private sales, so there is no trail that leads to the buyers, and alas, no equivalent forum culture exists among the collectors. Why do they want them? What do they do with them when they’ve bought them? If they’re sharing their passion, it’s more privately.

It’s true that there’s something electrifying about being able to own and handle a good luck charm from two thousand years ago. I’d like to think that people still wear them for luck, or like Henry Wellcome put them into overflowing cabinets of curiosities. Soon, I hope to join their ranks, these owners, and to have our very own piece of history to better understand things like patination and weight distribution. And then perhaps I can stop searching ebay for “phallic”, the snipers will have less competition, and my recommendations can get back to normal.

February 3, 2013 in Process, Sophie Sampson

From a design and production point of view, we’re going to follow a simple process that converts extensive research into a starting point for game design. Right now we’re in that research period, and are following up a few different strands:

  • Interviewing experienced teachers of PSHE to understand the requirements of our potential users
  • Interviewing teachers who have run previous pilots of Kate and Rebecca’s methodology, to get the teachers’ perspective
  • Talking to the facilitators who have run the previous pilots to get a sense of their methods and conclusion
  • Reviewing documentation of the previous pilots, which includes extensive feedback from some of the pupils involved
  • Reviewing the curriculum objectives for PHSE, and anywhere else in the curriculum this might potentially sit
  • Finding out more about the objects that are available to us at Blythe House – both their reproducibility and what is known about them historically
  • Understanding how to get the best out of the 3d scanning and printing process.

The research will point to what we particularly want the games to do, and that will give us a framework for evaluating success and failure alongside ‘is it fun’, though that is still a primary question. There’s a puritan streak in many educational games that seems to have the underlying assumption that educational and fun are different things, which always seems a shame to me. We’ll be looking to find a sweet spot where they overlap and re-inforce each other.

In parallel, I’ll be investigating and trialling the object reproduction process, looking to time it so the first prototypes are available to use in the two day March playtest which is the culmination of this round of R&D. Evaluation of that playtest will give us a strong base to improve our understanding of the problem space and what about our current designs is doing what we want it to.

The Pump Priming scheme is designed to give us space to evaluate feasibility and to do active research – we’re looking to reach a point where we have tested our assumptions and our designs, and we have the knowledge to go on and develop a robust educational resource which has the potential to be useful in a wide range of situations. I’m enormously grateful to the teachers and schools who are giving up some of their time to help us understand the space and test our designs – it will make a huge difference to the end result.

How it all started

February 1, 2013 in Kate FIsher, Rebecca Langlands

￼Roman lamp, probably 1st or 2nd century AD

Roman lamp, probably 1st or 2nd century AD

This object was discovered by academics Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands in the dark and dusty basement storeroom of the Science Museum as part of their research into sex across human history. It had been purchased by billionaire pharmaceutical giant Sir Henry Wellcome in the 1920s, but had never been displayed in public.

An ancient artifact like this offers us an intriguing glimpse into another world, where explicit images of sexual intercourse adorned everyday objects, like this cheap terracotta household lamp. Perhaps it lit a dinner table, where Roman parents sat down to eat with their children. The difference between our own society and those of ancient cultures when it comes to attitudes to sex and sexual imagery is stark.

It turned out that this was just one of hundreds of objects from across the world relating to sex and sexuality that Wellcome had collected. Together, as a collection, they provide a powerful resource for understanding the variety and complexity of human sexuality. As they began to work with these objects Kate and Rebecca realized that they provided an ideal stimulus for discussions about contemporary questions that affect us all – power relations, gender roles, pornography, censorship and openness, and issues about what and how we learn about sex when we are young.

So they brought the objects to young people, working through schools, charities and museums. They found that the objects provided eye-opening and empowering encounters with the past which expanded people’s horizons, and opened up new ways of talking about sex and important related issues. Bringing objects into the classroom transformed stilted and embarrassing sex education lessons.  Teachers and pupils involved in a pilot project talked about the ease and lack of embarrassment with which they were able to talk together about the things that really matter to them but that are normally hard to discuss. The objects drew them in yet provided an impersonal focus for discussion:

“The objects act as a go-between. They facilitate discussion, they make it okay to talk about sex.”

“The great thing about the project is that it allows institutions to talk about sex – which is otherwise full of problems”

Conversation Pieces – an experiment with games and museum objects

February 1, 2013 in Project description, Sophie Sampson

Objects like these tend to get hidden away. People don’t quite know what to make of them. They’re odd and intriguing and asking why they were made and used can open up whole worlds which don’t get written about in official histories.

The questions they raise and how later people answer them is exactly the area of study of Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, both historians at Exeter University. They’ve both published widely on the subject, and are asking questions few others are about why and how we explain away evidence from previous cultures that we now deem unacceptable.

They’ve also been running a pilot project in schools that uses these historical erotic objects to frame discussions in sex education classes.  They have found that being confronted with the objects has a powerful effect, particularly when you’re asked to imagine what was normal for the people who made them, commissioned them, and used them. What were they thinking, and why did they want to own this?

It takes people outside themselves and their everyday concerns. In a PSHE lesson this ‘othering’ is a really useful tool – the framing is no longer you, a teenager, talking about what you think and feel to your teacher – you are teasing out something strange and unrelated, which helps you to look at your own culture from outside a little.

PSHE lessons are a place for getting to grips with society, for learning how to thrive in a strange, confusing world, getting to know yourself better. However, it’s not easy to step outside yourself in school, in 45 minute periods, surrounded by the intricate web of social pressure and obligation that teenagers habitually operate under.

Why games?

I met Kate and Rebecca a year ago, under the auspices of the REACT Sandbox scheme, and we got talking about what we are both interested in. And what they said about the effect of their work immediately reminded me of games. Games are made of rules, and that gives you plausible deniability when you are playing. The particular affordances of an activity you can win or lose typically mean people lose their self-consciousness, stop worrying about what people think and start worrying about how to win.

I started to wonder if a ruleset might allow teachers to try new ways of hosting such discussions in their own classrooms – all the previous work had been run by some truly excellent facilitators, outside of normal classroom time.

What else apart from games?

There’s another issue, which is that these ancient objects, in some cases thousands of years old, can’t leave their museum storage. They certainly can’t be taken into schools without a curator to protect them for future generations. Previous activities have made do with photos of the objects, or taken the people doing the workshops directly to the museums, which is costly in both time and money.

Happily, the fine reproduction of fragile objects is easier than it’s ever been, and we’ll be investigating reproduction methods to make objects that can be handled and passed from hand to hand in a classroom, but have something of the emotional charge of the real thing. I know from work at the Natural History Museum that there’s a point at which models become good enough that looking at them produces the same effect as looking at the real thing. We’ll be looking to find that point.

What’s next?

And so now thanks to REACT we have some time and space to explore these issues with 14-18 year olds. I’m going to be collaborating with game designer Simon Katan on a piece of R&D with teachers and facilitators, to design and test some game ideas in schools and prototype objects. More here as it happens.

Right hand image © Wellcome Images


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Seasoned Advice is a question and answer site for professional and amateur chefs. It's 100% free, no registration required.

What is the best way to store stock in the freezer?

I can think of ice cubes and plastic bags, but am looking for other ideas.

Also, what would be the optimal portion size?

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We do ice cube trays (then transfer to freezer bags) or sometimes we'll use the pressure canner. –  Dinah Jul 15 '10 at 1:57

6 Answers 6

When I want to freeze portions of almost anything liquid (including stocks and sauces), I use a covered ice cube tray like OXO Good Grips. Just spoon it into the tray and throw it in the freezer. Easy! Keeps very well, and makes it very easy to portion out later.

The OXO product is my favourite, but it's not too hard to find generic substitutes at any superstore. Try to find one with a soft bottom so you don't struggle for 5 minutes trying to get the cubes out and then scraping the sides for all the bits you left behind.

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The ice cube tray is a great way to store stock. You just break out what you need. –  Kev Jul 10 '10 at 16:29
FYI: Your link has gone 404. I think the new link is either oxo.com/p-1041-ice-cube-tray.aspx or oxo.com/p-1203-no-spill-ice-cube-tray.aspx; they have two similar products, not sure which you're referring to. –  derobert Sep 23 '13 at 22:02
@derobert: Yep, it was the regular ice cube tray. Didn't know they had a "no spill" tray. Not sure why they need one, my regular tray has never spilled. –  Aaronut Sep 23 '13 at 23:48

I don't like ice cube trays as the only freezing method, simply because of portioning -- I typically make large batches of stock, and I only have so many ice cube trays. So I make a few different sizes, which are mostly just based on things I have, and so I have a variety of sizes when I need it:

  • Gallon zip-top bags : fill about half way, close all but a corner, remove all of the air you can, seal, lay on sheet pans so they don't freeze in strange shapes.
  • Small bread pans (I think they were sold as 'mini loaf' pans, they're about 1/4 to 1/3 the volume of a 'standard' loaf pan, maybe 2-3 cups each Freeze, release, store in zip-top bags with as much air removed as possible.
  • Ice cube trays (for when you only need a Tb for a sauce, or when you just need to cool down a bowl of soup quickly without diluting it).

I've also been known to use muffin tins for freezing things that I'll be using about 3/4c. at a time. (eg, pesto)

Oh -- and of course, for the plastic bags, you'll want to cool the stock down first. I don't tend to refrigerate it first, as I use enough bones that it'll go gelatinous on me if I do. I cool it down to near room temperature through use of a cold water bath (I put my stock pot in the sink, then fill the sink with cold water and ice, and stir every few minutes)

I've never checked the freezing time of stock from hot / cold (Mpemba effect), but I'd be reluctant to put large volumes of hot items in my freezer .. so maybe ice cube trays, but the rest I cool before freezing.

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Yes, I use those zip-tops as well: a great way to store it. Also very easy to just "break" a small portion from it. –  Bart Kiers Jul 17 '10 at 12:21
You can get all the air out of the bag by submerging it in a sink full of water. Leave the unclosed corner out, and zip it up as you pull it under the water. The pressure from the water will expel all the air. I use the technique for sous vide rather than a vacuum machine. –  yossarian Jan 17 '11 at 17:36

I use quart ziplock bags. I fill them fully, and freeze them on their side on a flat surface. I also often use 1 pint plastic takeout containers. I have found that those two sizes nearly always are the right amounts for me.

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I store my stock in 250ml one-use rectangular dozes with a cap.

  • I find the 250ml ideal portion for my usual needs.
  • One-use dozes are very cheap and I don't have to care about cleaning them. They are also much thinner and that saves a lot of space in the freezer.
  • Rectangular shape also saves space.
  • The stock doesn't really need to be covered with a cap. As soon as it freezes, it doesn't matter. But having a cap allows me to pile them up. Again, this saves space in the freezer.

My friend - a professional chef - has another method. But it requires some equipment:

He puts the stock into a plastic bag. Then he uses a machine that sucks all the air from it and seals it. He freezes each flat bag individualy. Once they are frozen, he stacks them. This allows optimum use of freezer space.

When he needs to use the stock, he just cuts the bag open and break the frozen stock into pieces. It's easy, because the slices of frozen stock are very thin.

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I usually put 500 ml portions in a quart zip-lock bag and put the bags in a bread pan to help retain their shape while I freeze them.

But I recently bought some "tovolo king" silicone ice cube trays for freezing portions of baby food (about 100 mL per cube) and found that they're also good for freezing small portions of stock or broth. Since they're silicone, it's easy to peel the mold off of the cube after freezing. (I freeze them and then bag the cubes.)

The 500 mL bags are nice when I need a few cups of broth and the 100 mL cubes are nice when I need smaller portions.

They also make a smaller tray of 1 oz cubes, which are useful when you need a small amount of stock to finish a sauce. (I also use them for leftover coconut milk.)

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Plastic quart and pint containers....the kind frequently used for Chinese take-out in the US. Inexpensive. Reusable. Microwave safe. Dishwasher Safe. Can write on with Sharpie...Sharpie wipes off for new label.

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May 13, 2013

Who says 58 year olds can’t get a job?

Filed under: Interviewing, Job Search, Q&A, Readers' Forum, Stuff I love

In the May 14, 2013 Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, a reader tells how he landed a job with more money, more vacation, in short order — at age 58:

I just wanted to tell you that I got a new job. Though I got this job by responding to a posting on LinkedIn, I used some of your methods during the process.

over-50This employer required a personality test, a cognitive test, a panel interview, and a puzzle test. I had to figure out a problem during the panel interview. I also had one extra interview with the vice president. Your typical HR-centric process.

So, what did I do that followed your advice? To be honest, I was a bit upset at the testing process, but this seemed a little useless since it was a requirement and I passed all the tests easily. I decided that I would make a quick package to show how I would do the job.

  • I created an outline of how I would approach the job.
  • I defined a process called a “Business Intelligence Baseline” that I would do on my first weeks on the job.
  • I enclosed a sample of a similar project I had done for another employer.
  • I also included a quick summary of a conference I went to on Big Data, because I knew that this firm was looking to get into Big Data.

I sent it to the VP.

I was offered the job with a slight raise and twice as much vacation time as my previous employer. (I should have gotten your salary book to help me with negotiations!)

Well, I don’t think that is the “it” job. It is the “for now” job.

Now I am going to start doing the process you recommend. I am going to do the networking and the other things you suggest. I like the point you make in How Can I Change Careers? that a person should be doing this all the time. When I need to move on, I will be ready.

To put this all in context, I was laid off from my job on March 22. I contacted these people on April 9, and got a formal offer on April 30. I just want to thank you so much. I will continue to follow you online and via subscription. I am not expecting a response. I just want you to know that on this pass I have been only a fair disciple of your methods. I promise next time I will do better. Thanks again.

Your “only fair” disciple,

Andy Hoyt

PS — September 14 is my 59th birthday!

Nick’s Reply

Your story needs no reply, no advice from me. Just a hearty congratulations! Thanks for sharing it. Readers sometimes ask me for a “template” they can follow to their next job offer. You’re 59 — theoretically almost unemployable. Your template works! (Those looking for more about this, please check The Basics. Also related to Andy’s experience: Don’t miss Erica Klein’s excellent Guest Voices article, Employment Tests: Get an edge. Erica’s article will soon appear in greatly expanded format as a new Ask The Headhunter PDF book. Stay tuned! )

I wish you the best, and I hope you’ll stay in touch to tell us about your next job offer…!

I’d love to hear from job hunters who try an approach similar to Andy’s. The steps closely follow what we discuss on Ask The Headhunter. Andy showed how he’d do the job! Do you know anyone who made a deal like this one happen?

: :

22 Comments on “Who says 58 year olds can’t get a job?”
By Donald
May 14, 2013 at 7:12 am

I am impressed and encouraged by Andy’s experience. However, as someone who just joined the ranks of the 50 somethings, I am offended that you would label us as “old-timers.”

By Josie
May 14, 2013 at 7:25 am

Hi Nick:

I’ve been following your blog and advice for years. When I was laid off from a big pharma company, I panicked naturally from the pressure of needing to meet my financial responsibilities. However, I took a breath, adjusted my thinking and went to work on my next opportunity. Using your advice and methods, similar to Donald, I did land my next and current position that I have been in for 2 years. During the search process, each company that I identified and researched and presented to offered me a position. The first one I accepted was my right now job. Then I found the “it” job that I have now. For those non-believers, your methods work. I even used your “How to Work with Headhunters” for one position. Keep up the good work. My next job will be joining you on the beach!

PS: I’m celebrating the 31st anniversary of my 25th birthday!

By Steve Amoia
May 14, 2013 at 8:40 am

Every newly-minted college graduate should read Andy’s story and learn from it. I doubt that most of them learned these strategies from their professors.

Well done, Sir.

By Nick Corcodilos
May 14, 2013 at 12:39 pm

@Donald: You left out part of the quote. Here’s what I actually wrote:

“Know any old timers (!) who got a job recently?”

The exclamation point is intended to reveal my ire at the term and the attitude of some employers. I think that comes through. I use terms like that while shaking my head and rolling my eyes. Sorry if that didn’t come through to you. I meant no offense.

By Nick Corcodilos
May 14, 2013 at 12:41 pm

@Josie: Man, you’re old and working! :-)

(Pls see my “explanation” about my choice of words in my reply to Donald.)

Thanks for your very kind words. You’re proof that delivering profitable work and “showing the green” can trump the grey. My compliments to you AND to your “it” employer! You made my day.

By Addie
May 14, 2013 at 12:55 pm

‘ve been in my current job almost 20 years, still like it a lot, and have a great boss. But I needed a change and wanted to do more writing and critical thinking and less research. I’m probably older than most people thinking about job changes. About a year ago I applied for and was offered the job of my dreams. A key person in the chain of command hadn’t been hired yet, and since much of my work would have been under that person, I turned the job down. I did the right thing opting for the secure job I like, and I learned a really valuable lesson in the process of those three interviews. If your age doesn’t matter to you, it probably won’t matter to anyone else. The people who interviewed me reacted to my energy, not numbers. A very wise speaker once said, “My age is none of my business,” an adage I hold close.

By don
May 14, 2013 at 3:42 pm

Age is relative. I had a cousin in his 80’s with a spouse also in her 80s. He had an aunt in her early 100’s. When talking with them she always referred to them as “you kids”
Employers make their life harder. It’s about ability stupid. It’s hard enough to get that right without complicating it with stereo types.
@Donald…I’m an old timer..I’m 74, and picked up my job at 69. Job hunting over 50 is just a bit more challenging, over 60 character building, but at least not bogged down by the heavy lifting those old timers of 100 have.
For you job hunters over 100 my apologies for calling you old timers.

By Nic
May 15, 2013 at 6:43 am

Of course, he landed this job and it comes as no surprise. I congratulate the employer too for recognizing talent.

Today business people who want the job done and done right the first time around know men (and women) over 45 are far more intelligent, sophisticated, skilled, and serious than their younger peers today.

I would take a 70-year-old executive secretary with 35 plus years’ experience over some 25-year-old multi-degree simpleton who wants to sit all day on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and whatever else we view as time wasting amusement largely for simpleminded people she can find. I know, as a fact, we will not look at anyone who is not deadly serious and who is clearly addicted to technology, especially a slave to social media.

In my opinion, a business or businessman worth his weight knows his employees represent him and his firm. I want knowledge of proper etiquette (both social and business) and someone that is ethical and reliable with a mind. My business partner and I just agreed that we would seriously consider people of those qualities mentioned above (largely meaning those way over age 45) when hiring.

As Nick said, this one requires no comment. It is ripe for personal comment and congratulations.

By Bill Boggs
May 15, 2013 at 11:16 am

As a full-time educator and part-time piano teacher I have found it hard to adjust to the “new” way of finding employment, especially for us babyboomers. I remember times when all it took was a “skill” to get a job and now it’s taking numerous tests. The world has changed and us new to the “tech world” better get used to it or be left behind.

By marybeth
May 15, 2013 at 7:45 pm

I am so glad that he got the job! Nick’s post shows that there is at least one employer out there who decided to be sensible and let the letter writer show him what he could do rather than relying upon a battery of psycho tests, personality tests (though the personality tests can be useful, but in a self-assessment way, or for a business consultant, but not as a screening tool), computer software, algorithms, and other screening tools.

At my current job, there is a full time opening. They posted the job, and I heard from one of my colleagues that there were 87 applicants (though I don’t know if there was any preliminary screening done by a computer). He said that they were able to automatically eliminate 6 applicants because they didn’t meet one or more of the requirements, including 2 internal applicants (meaning wider college internal applicants–both of them lacked the necessary master’s degree(s) and experience–one is currently working in IT and has complained to the dean about being eliminated. The dean told her “this is a professional reference librarian position–we REQUIRE applicants to have either an MLS or an MILS (Master’s in Library Science or Master’s in Information and Library Science) degree from an ALA-accredited institution, a minimum of three years’ full time professional work experience in reference, have experience in web design, and more. You aren’t even close.” This did not go over well with the IT person, but the college administration is backing our dean. Two of my colleagues are applying for it. I’ve heard that they’re going to interview 8 people, including the 2 internal part time reference librarians, and that the way they handle the interview is to give the interviews “problems” so they can demonstrate how they’d solve them. When I heard that, I asked the dean and one of the other full time reference librarians if they followed Nick’s blog. I got blank looks, but I smiled to myself because that is exactly the kind of interview I’d want–give me a problem or problems so I can show you how I’d solve them. One of my colleagues told me that she’s nervous about it because she’s never had an interview like that, and I told her all of the ways this is the BEST kind of interview. And I told her to think about every weird patron and question and plan how she’d answer and deal with them. That’s her interview.

By Nick
May 16, 2013 at 8:56 am

I’m a volunteer director and the organization is hiring a summer student. I’m definitely using the ATH website and blogs ideas to interview the future candidates.

And well done Andy!

By Citizen X
May 18, 2013 at 8:31 am

I, too, was 58 when I lost my job. At 62, I’m surviving my survival job quite well.

Normally, I stay away from Fox News as far as possible, but a link led me to their business reporting website, so my unconscious mind reasoned that not even Fox News could do too much damage to business reporting, so I carefully read the post.

It seems that companies and corporations have discovered that they need the experience and “acumen” of “mature workers” after all, and have begun rolling out the welcome mat after unceremoniously hanging up the GO AWAY sign in the help wanted ads for the last twenty years.

On one hand, this is good news; one the other hand, as one of my age-range counterparts making $120K a year said in an AARP article, “I didn’t grow stupid just because I lost my job.”

Please bear with me while I briefly recap events that led to our age-range’s improved negotiating position.

December 2007: The Great Financial Fiasco begins.

2008: Things become noticeably bad.

2009: Things are really bad, but no one really knows how bad (In March, I lost my high-paying job.)

2010: Manpower graphs that jobs really did dip below the zero mark in 2009.

2011: Studies show that the effects of long-term unemployment lower life expectancy.

2012: Research shows that the longer you keep working, the longer you live.

2013: Old people are recognized as vital to the success of companies and corporations.

2014: Old people take revenge by retiring early, not because they have to, but because they refuse to work for unappreciative companies and corporations (unless the compensation returns to its original trajectory—at my projection, at least 5% annually from whenever the compensation was interrupted).

Back in the 1960’s, when I was an honorary hippie, they called radical people our age Gray Panthers.

Negotiations in 2014 should prove interesting . . .

At any rate, things are looking up for people in our “age-range”. Don’t give up hope, because one thing I’ve learned is that relief comes approximately five minutes after you have given up. So don’t give up. Like Nick said once, “There may be 999 no’s, but it only takes one ‘yes’.” That’s what kept me going.

Congratualtions to all.

By Gwen
May 19, 2013 at 4:36 pm

I just love all the posts on here. Good stuff as it gives hope and a reminder to what really matters in a job hunt-talent!

By Success Story! How to Get a Job at 58? Demonstrate Your Value | Melanie Joan Dunn
June 4, 2013 at 4:10 pm

[…] a recent post Nick quoted a 58 year-old reader who had recently landed a new job using some of Nick’s […]

June 20, 2013 at 2:08 pm

Is there an template you used for how you would approach the job?

By Ask The Headhunter® | Nick Corcodilos – 71 Years Old: Got in the door at 63 and just got a raise!
July 1, 2013 at 8:33 pm

[…] recently heard from a 58-year-old who landed a new job. But your husband is in his sixties. I can offer you two things: Evidence that people in their […]

By Eddie
July 2, 2013 at 10:17 am

Sometimes, It is reverse age discrimination. My dad retired (pushed out with a big bonus to pension calculation) from the federal govt at 62 and got a job in the private sector, survived 9 layoffs, decided to retire for good at 85. My mom also worked for the federal govt and retired at 72. She was mostly used as a show piece as a model “mature worker” and pleaded for her to stay on to 75. this was years ago You go figure.

By Bruce Baillie
August 5, 2013 at 2:26 pm

“There may be 999 no’s, but it only takes one ‘yes’.” That’s what kept me going.

Thanks, I’ll remember that one, it’ll help to keep me going in my search!

By Daryl J
February 10, 2014 at 11:19 pm

Hitting the big 60 this year, I can say that us older folks are exactly what many employers are looking for. While many college grads and other younger generations may have more tech skills, our people skills are far superior. If you have sales skills and people skills you will blow away many of these new “high tech” youngsters.

By Anita
April 29, 2015 at 11:36 am

I am a very “young” 58. I was laid off by Citigroup in late 2012, and have had difficulty getting employment. I am much smarter than my younger counterparts, masterfully articulate, yet have been turned down for every job in the financial services field that I have applied to. ALL THE BIG BANKS. I am weary of what else I can do to become gainfully employed, NOW. Living in Dallas, county Texas is a big issue I believe. I know if I were in New York, San Francisco or other progressive cities, I would be more accepted in the job market. ANY SUGGESTIONS? Thanks

By Don
April 29, 2015 at 7:35 pm

@Anita. I’m not going to say one’s age when you get up there isn’t a factor. It is. I’m nearly 76, so I can opine with some experience behind me.

But age isn’t always a deal breaker and your challenge is to find out where it isn’t. for instance I’ve been employed where I’m at for over 6 years and got this job when I was nearly 70. I speak from experience. they are there.

Suggestion 1 is to dig into the archives of Ask The Headhunter, & go beyond this one discussion. There’s a wealth of information on age, but that’s just an informational detour.

Look for information and insights on how to network, the value of it. Because that’s how you’ll find that place & person who couldn’t care less about your age, but rather as you noted, how smart you are about your profession

Your best bet for landing is via networking. Networking is the way to go for job hunting per se, but if you have to deal with age..the reality and your perceptions…networking is THE valuable tool for the older job hunter as you need to sell yourself to people, not input to websites and career pages.

Suggestion 2. With the above research done, start applying it to networking your way into chosen companies…and stop standard operating procedure applying to jobs.

You’ve already tested the market on job applying and you know that’s not working. Remember the definition of insanity…doing the same thing over & over & expecting different results. You’ve tried the traditional way, just about everyone is doing & it’s not work. You’re long overdue for trying a different approach. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I’ve had several jobs after 55, and all via networking. And don’t say you don’t have a network, everyone has one. Start from there & build it up.

Stop looking for jobs, start looking for companies. I know you said you’ve “applied” to all the Big Banks. If you find any that are appealing forget their wish list & forget you applied. Do some research, figure out who/what department where you can add value, capture that value and find your way to the hiring managers & use that value proposition. How? Call them up, email them, snail mail them. make your pitch. this may seem very unappealing, but trust me, I’m a 10th degree black belt introvert. If I can do it, anyone can. It’s an acquired skill.

Suggestion #3. You said all the BIG Banks, by pass that and aim at the smaller banks, financial institutions. Small is better for networking.

Suggestion #4. Learn how to deal with recruiters, learn how recruiters work…then be your own recruiter. Good recruiters are good networkers, that’s why they are good, and that’s why they succeed.

By Nick Corcodilos
April 30, 2015 at 10:34 am

@Anita: Don said it all!

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text:
Why Credit Crunch Cutbacks Must NOT affect your staff training programme

Not only are some businesses making dangerous decisions on reining back their marketing efforts to cut costs during the economic downturn, some are even slashing their investment in staff training; a move that could have long-term negative consequences. But there is an answer to this risky attitude: don't cut training altogether, just cut the cost! By switching to video training a business can continue to be competitive and still save money.

Leading lights in the Human Resources field have warned that budget cutbacks involving putting staff training on hold until things start to look up financially is a false economy that could have dangerous consequences for businesses.

A study conducted by Common Purpose *, an international leadership development organisation, showed that just under half of all training and development professionals were expecting training budgets to be cut by at least 20%.

What happens if a lack of investment in your staff means they defect to one of your competitors?

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Not keeping up to date with training lowers market competitiveness

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The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has warned that slashing training budgets could have an undesirable effect on a company's ability to survive the economic slowdown. Their chief economist John Philpott said: "Training cutbacks reduce the ability of organisations to cope in a downturn and can also damage staff morale, employee engagement and organisational performance for years to come."

Staff training programme

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Video Training

No longer limited to the major names in software packages, video training is becoming extremely popular and its benefits are many. Not only is it far more economical to commission a training video than it is to send staff on training courses, video training is also far more adaptable. Instead of generalised training, you can commission the production of a video to teach specific skills and methods that are relevant to each member of staff, and what is more, they can follow them at their own pace.

Training videos can be viewed via a company's website; an intranet or a CD or DVD. They can incorporate images, captions, voiceovers and anything else that may help illustrate how a system works.

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* Common Purpose website: www.commonpurpose.org.uk

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Jeff Robinson

"In 2002, I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis, and after some initial physical therapy which did not help (from another therapist), was put on a regimen of Celebrex which abated the pain. The pain stopped in 2004 and I stopped taking Celebrex. In October, 2005, after a long airline flight, the same pain returned (a deep aching pain in my right shoulder blade). After consulting with my doctor, I was referred to Jeff Robinson to help me handle a pinched nerve between my C4 and C5 vertebrae. After two sessions, the pain was gone. In follow up sessions, Jeff showed me how to properly stretch and to keep the pinched nerve from not returning. Best of all, it's a good feeling to have total trust in the competency and professionalism of your medical provider which I have in Jeff Robinson."
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text:
Ready to Reach Hispanic America?
Roberto Ruiz
Senior Vice President, Strategy & Insights Group

Focus Areas: Hispanic Consumer Insights with a focus on CPG, Retail, Telecommunications, Shopper Marketing, Consumer Electronics; Creative Best Practices; Acculturation

Previous Speaking Engagements: Hispanic Consumer 360, SRS Multicultural Marketing Conference, Direct Marketing Association, American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), Diageo Multicultural Marketing

Roberto Ruiz is senior vice president of Strategy & Insights at Univision Communications Inc, the leading media company serving Hispanic America. Mr. Ruiz works with a team of marketers whose goal is to help corporations capitalize on the US Hispanic consumer as a source of growth. The team drives all aspects of marketing, from research to consumer insights to building the business case for brands, using syndicated and custom research tools.

Mr. Ruiz is a Hispanic Marketing expert with more than 20 years of experience in senior management positions at client, agency and media. Throughout his career, he has worked in several industries including financial services, interactive, advertising, consulting, startups and packaged goods.

Prior to joining Univision in 2008, Mr. Ruiz served as the founder and President of Consumer Contacts, a boutique consulting firm specializing in Hispanic marketing. Previously, Mr. Ruiz was a founding partner at The Vidal Partnership, a Hispanic advertising agency in New York. He was one of four partners that took the business from a mid-size agency to a powerhouse recognized twice by Ad Age as agency of the year. At Vidal, Roberto worked on accounts such as DirecTV, Century21 Real Estate, MasterCard, Diageo, and Cingular Wireless.

Prior to that, Mr. Ruiz worked at Prodigy Internet and led the team that launched the first fully bilingual Internet Service Provider targeting Hispanics in the US.

Mr. Ruiz moved to the US from Venezuela in 1993 to pursue his MBA and started a career at MCI Communications Inc. where he held management positions in direct response, telemarketing and international marketing; targeting Hispanic consumers in the US and Latin America. After MCI, Mr. Ruiz held the senior marketing position at MoneyGram, where he led the Mexico and Latin America money transfer business.

Mr. Ruiz’ career in marketing and advertising started in Venezuela, where he received his classic marketing training working in consumer packaged goods at Pillsbury, Gillette, and Mavesa. A bug for the creative took him to lead the strategic planning group at one of the top ad agencies in the country ARS/DDB where he also fell in love with the international marketing side of the business.

Mr. Ruiz is actively engaged in speaking at trade conferences, including the Association of American Advertising Agencies, The Direct Marketing Association, the Consumer Healthcare Product Association, Nielsen’s Consumer 360, among others. He also collaborated with author Chiqui Cartagena in writing “Hispanic Boom: A guide for Hispanic Marketers.”

Mr. Ruiz holds an MBA in International Business and a MA in International Economics from The George Washington University and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He lives in Leonia, NJ, with his wife and two kids. He is an avid golfer, a pilot and an aviation fanatic.

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