A Painted Field of Play

The Art Arena game-model that our team uses was the outcome of a search for a way of giving many children at a time something of the richness of experience that might be had in the little workshops called the Junior Arts and Science Centres (JASC).
The search was sparked off when Kingston Polytechnic offered to house a JASC on condition that it took big numbers and none of the expensive kinetics and electronic gear. Eventually, experiments in the design workshop of the liberal studies department at Kingston led to the idea of using art based gaming. An analysis of the childrens' experience at a workshop suggested that four learning skills might be explored in four gaming processes.
1. The scenario scan which involves the assimilation of data from an imaginative scene.
2. Strategy - logical thinking through the manipulation of colour, shape, etc.
3. Teamwork - group-judgment in the sense of aesthetic and moral discrimination.
4. Tactics as physical sensibility in the handling of paint, and manoeuvring generally on the painted field of play.

The outcome of a game is usually an enormous painting, but we have also had spring festival dragons, ceramic murals, designs for tapestry, and playground movement-groups with hordes of children - in which case the result is a colourful spectacle suitable for film or video.

Over a hundred of the painting games take their scenarios from school subjects such as arithmetic and geometry as well as sci-fi and fantasy invented by the children themselves.

A game's target is to achieve, as a group of teams an enlargement and fusion of all the teams' plans so that the resulting artwork is a unity. Any conflict which may come about in the process is usually resolved through one of many combinatory techniques that art has to offer, such as the mixing of colours, the superimposition of shapes, or counterchange, and so on. Here the advice of a teacher of art or craft may well trigger off a chain of ideas.