Games, Learning Tools and Workshops

PonsVerhoog is dedicated to developing and designing learning tools in which critical thinking is key. We care for different ways of learning-improving-growing in which teaching and learning is approached as a commutation of knowledge. Our focus is on Inclusive Pedagogy, critical Visual Literacy and Creative Practices.

We make use of:

Pedagogy, by implementing critical and transgressive pedagogy: the basis to strengthen self-regulated, collaborative learning in diverse contexts.
Game Theory, to enhance experiential learning and making experimentation and iteration enjoyable.

Games and Learning Tools

My Photography Toolbox

A game to train your eye and improve your skills on visual language

My Photography Toolbox is a reference deck of cards for those who work with images, photography and visual design. Each card plays with a visual concept like Composition, Fundamentals, Principles or even Attitudes and is complemented by an example card.

A Family game that enhances memory and language skills

Pispa promotes linguistic diversity and esteem for vocabulary, activates memory, increases visual-mental association, gives free rein to strategy, sustains collaboration

Pispa

My Photography Game

A visual challenge in the shape of a quartet game

One of the 21st century skills on literacy directs to the mediated surrounding. Practicing to understand how images are made, what they mean, or how they create emotions and generate impact is crucial. My Photography Game helps to unravel the visual elements in photographs, paintings and illustrations

Actions Beyond Expectation, A Social Activator Game

In Lost Sense players perform a special greeting action with their hands while they discover the fun of having to recognize each other without the help of vision neither sound.

Lost Sense

Workshops

These experiential courses and workshops are set up acknowledging that change (and learning) manifest through our brains as well as through our bodies.

“realising safe spaces and the richness of diversity”

Diversity and Inclusion

Acknowledging non dominant references as a powerful source of interaction, and the terminology on inclusion and exclusion.

  • Creating a safe space.
  • Making together to find out the dynamics in a group.
  • Study cases as situated examples of the power of diversity.
  • Embodied activities to feel myself and the other for changing group dynamics.
  • Tools for allowing play, imagination, possibility, collaborative renewal, and engaged ethics.

Courses for Teachers and Educators

What we do, and how we do it needs to be shared, understood, pedagogically defined and mobilized through our practice. This is the base of our self-actualization workshops.

  • Embodied exercises to dismantle the central position of the “institutional teacher”.
  • Study case scenarios to dissect critical repetitive situations.
  • The application of memetics to assess complex behavior.
  • Methods to engage students to critique, make suggestions, take part of the process.
  • Tools for building up caring attitudes, and sense of community.
  • Play as learning activator.

“courses in understanding the structures of visual communication”

Visual Literacy and Visual Cultures

Understanding how images are loaded with meaning. Acquiring a practice of interpretation by experimenting with the principles of visual language, and a critical eye to confront the overload of visual propaganda.

  • Individual and team based experiments combining visual rules.
  • Image analysis, connoted meaning and context.
  • Exercises that offer active forms of lifelong self-learning, stimulate experimentation and creativity while enabling critical thinking.

Creative Processes

Understanding the different phases in creative work. Working in trans-disciplinary collaboration.

“enhancing awareness of – and confidence in – individual creative processes"

  • Research and design by doing.
  • Activities combining informal research tools and experimentation.
  • Individual and team based experiments with different materials.
  • Study cases of different practices.
  • Tools for allowing play, imagination, possibility, collaborative renewal, and engaged ethics.