NMAM Conference: Las Vegas Alive!

Greetings all! Since my last blog, Nellie Price and I attended the NMAM Conference held in Santa Fe, NM. We hosted a round table discussion about Interactivity and Education, discussing the details of Las Vegas Alive!, and even played the game as a group! The overall experience was wonderful! We got to share what we’ve been doing at our museum with others in the field, and got invaluable feedback on Las Vegas Alive! from other educators, researchers, and museum professionals.

Outlined as part of our presentation were the rules of the game, the lesson plan and rubric, and how the game measures up to the state’s standards and benchmarks for education. We talked about the characteristics of the game, the testing experience, and the research experience. As part of a PowerPoint presentation we showed pictures of the various museum visits whereLas Vegas Alive! was played, the timeline that sets up the boundaries for the game, examples of the card deck, and a portion of one of the campaigns.

Every detail of the game was elaborated on. We discussed how we determined our timeline and boundaries according to major events that correlate with U.S. and world history, which events we chose for our campaigns, our goals in relaying the concept of community through the game, what historical information was most essential for our purposes, our efforts to make the characters and occupations accurate and specific to our location, and what artifacts and props best match the characters and occupations. We also brought up our future game plans which include a second time period, more characters and occupations, more campaigns, and the introduction of famous, real-life characters to the card deck, (i.e. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Kit Carson, Charles Ilfeld, Jesusita Aragon, and the Duncan family).

The conference was a success! Everyone included in our discussion enjoyed playing the game, and thought it was a great way to make museum visits interactive and educational. Adding to the excitement, next year’s conference will be held here in Las Vegas. And, we look forward to hosting it!

Laura M. Gonzales
Humanities Consultant