Teaching with LUNA – A Guide for Educators

Two Ways of Using LUNA in Teaching

Game design as subject matter: students learn to design and analyse games systematically – in game design programmes, but also in media, culture and design disciplines. Here LUNA provides vocabulary, analytical lens and design tool at once.

Game design as method: students open up a subject by designing a game about it. Whoever builds a learning game about material cycles, urban planning or grammar has to penetrate the subject structurally – which elements exist, which interactions, what is the core? The design process is the instrument of analysis here; the finished game is a by-product, the penetration is the learning goal. For this way of using LUNA, the teacher needs no expertise in game design – the guided, card-based process carries it.

Both ways can be combined; they differ, however, in the standard of assessment (see below).

Deployment Scenarios

Single workshop (3–4 hours). A focused excerpt, not the whole arc: for instance ideation with two stacks and the ideation worksheet, or an analysis session with deconstruction cards on games the participants brought along. Rule of thumb: one or two material forms, one concept, one tangible intermediate result per group.

Block seminar (2–3 days). The full arc from idea to playable paper prototype: day 1 ideation (reference games, stacks, fundamental decisions), day 2 development (basic worksheet, deep dives as needed), day 3 prototype and first playtest with structured evaluation.

Semester course. Like the block seminar, but with iterations: worksheets as milestones across the semester, at least two playtest rounds, a reflection report at the end. The worksheet states document the path – which relieves the final assessment of the end product.

Reference values that have proven themselves in practice: 4–6 people per table, one complete card set per table, parallel tables are unproblematic. Time-box each phase strictly (see stumbling blocks).

Which Entry for Which Group

Learning group	Recommended entry
Little gaming experience, non-specialist	Frame-driven (via topic/world) or Experience-driven (via the feeling) – neither requires games knowledge
Design-minded, systems-interested	Mechanism-driven or Structure-driven
Artistically oriented	Appearance-driven
Little time, clear learning content	Entry Mode Remix/Adaptation: rework a well-known game (Happy Families, Memory, Werewolf) towards the subject matter – the fastest route to a playable result
Advanced students with their own project	Desiderata-driven, with the agent persona deep dive

The approaches are a compass, not rails (cf. 06-en-where-to-start.md) – plan the entry firmly, but allow groups to switch perspective along the way.

Material Logistics

Along the three material levels:

• From LUNA: stacks, worksheets, boards. Worksheets get written on (print fresh copies per group and run); cards and boards are reusable.
• From the institution: sticky notes, thick pens, timers, replacement blank cards – and a handful of widely known games as reference and cannibalisation material (proven: one card game, one board game with components, one social deduction game). For paper prototypes: blank cards, dice, tokens, scissors, glue.
• Documented methods: practices/ contains worked-out workshop procedures with time structure and material list – look them up there instead of improvising; this guide deliberately does not duplicate them.

Dosing the Terminology

The most common didactic mistake is to start with the terminology. The reverse order is more effective: first get the phenomenon onto the table (via reference games or the first round of cards), then offer the term once the group already holds the thing in its hands. The information boards are made for exactly this – they lie alongside and are consulted, not lectured. For the first contact, a core of a handful of terms suffices (04-en-first-terms.md); nobody needs the internal differentiation of the rules concept or the meaning triad at the beginning.

Assessing

LUNA work can be assessed fairly if you examine quality of justification rather than quality of product. “Is the game good?” is unusable as an examination criterion – too much of it lies with the agents and the chance of the group. Load-bearing artefacts are:

• Worksheet states: Are decisions justified? Are coherence decisions (congruence/contrast/abstraction) named rather than made accidentally? Is it stated what is not being presupposed about the players?
• Playtest protocols: Was there observation rather than defence? Does the finding lead to a concrete change?
• Reflection report: Can the person describe their own draft in LUNA terms and name alternatives that were discarded – and why?

With “game design as method”, the subject standard is added: does the game structurally represent the subject correctly? A factually wrong but entertaining learning game is a failure there.

Typical Stumbling Blocks

• Terminology overload: see above – terms follow, they do not lead.
• Cards as a checklist: groups that try to “use all the cards” produce overloaded drafts. Clarify early: stacks are a menu, not a shopping list.
• Ideation devours everything: without strict time-boxing, groups keep selecting instead of deciding. The transition to the worksheet is the moment where teachers may intervene.
• A forced meaning layer: groups often believe their game “needs a story”. Take the optionality of the meaning layer seriously – a deliberately abstract game is a legitimate, often stronger result.
• Examples that do not carry: adapt reference examples to the group – use several widely known games and check that they are actually known in the room. An example that has to be explained explains nothing.

Feedback to the Project

LUNA is continuously tested and revised in workshops. Findings from your teaching are explicitly welcome: under supplements/ you will find a participant form and a moderation form (s02-en-feedback-form-participants.md, s03-en-feedback-form-moderation.md) whose results flow into material revision in a structured way. If a card, a worksheet or a procedure did not work in your group, that is not an operating error but a data point the project needs.

Theoretical Connectivity

For educators who want to see the foundations: every core term is worked out in a term document with derivation and distinctions (concepts/term/); the relations between terms are documented in the relation documents (concepts/relation/). A scholarly publication presenting the theoretical foundations in context is in preparation – the primer deliberately does not replace it.