Who are You?
Who should be the Facilitator for your Anywear Academy?
Whoever wants to be!
The person who has the most drive to pull a group together and start up a game often ends up being the Facilitator by default, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
As long as you have experience working with kids, you can be an Anywear Academy Facilitator.
There is no prerequisite background in technology, theatre, or improv necessary.
It is very easy to learn and teach others.
Role of the Facilitator
Facilitators have a special role in the edularp.
As Facilitators, you are a referee. When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, Facilitators decide how to apply the rules and keep the story going.
As Facilitators, you are a storyteller. Facilitators sets the pace of the story and presents the various challenges and encounters that the players must overcome. The Facilitator is the players’ interface to the edularp world, as well as the one who scaffoleds the adventure and describes what happens in response to the characters’ actions.
As Facilitators, you are a roleplayer. A Facilitator plays the Shapeshifting villain in the adventure, choosing their actions and leaving hints for the Trainees to uncover. Facilitators also plays the parts of all the other characters (see Non Player Characters (NPCs) for more) who the adventurers meet, including helpful ones.
The most important thing to remember about being a good Facilitar is that the rules are a tool to help you and the players have fun. The rules aren’t in charge. You’re the Facilitator—you’re in charge of the game.
Pacing
There's a lot of moving parts to keep track of when running Anywear Academy for the first time, so initially you may easily blaze through the missions at a much quicker pace than what's listed.
A tenet of the design of Anywear Academy is that it is structure in such a way that control is given more over time. The nature of the mission goes from an objective-oriented motivation to a more open-ended and intrinsically-led motivation. We've designed it in this way to provide Trainees an onramp to develop ttheir creativity, independence, and self-efficacy.
Structure early on breeds comfort for both you, the Facilitator(s), and the Trainees. Coding/Crafting time is fairly unstructured and open-ended. We recommend having the initial days less open-ended at the start. This can mean shorter coding/crafting time and running more than 2 Missions that day. As everyone gets more comfortable, scaffolding control by giving it back to the students as you go along is a recipe for success.
Facilitator Tips
When in doubt, make it up.
It’s better to keep the game moving than to get bogged down in the rules.
Embrace the shared story.
Edularping is about telling a story as a group, so let your Trainees contribute to the outcome through the words and deeds of their characters.
Pay attention to how your Trainees behave with each other and with you. If there is an inside joke that develops, explore ways you can incorporate it into the Finale for a satisfying conclusion!
Also if some Trainees are reluctant to speak up, remember to ask them what their characters are doing.
It’s not a competition.
The Facilitator isn’t competing against the Trainees.
Your job is to referee the rules, interact with players as NPCs, and keep the story moving.
It is also important that Trainees are not competing with each other. As Facilitator, ensure that cooperative collaboration is the motivation behind the Trainees costume designs, not competition!
Be consistent and fair.
If you decide that a rule works a certain way, make sure it works that way the next time it comes into play. Treat the rules and your Trainees in a fair, impartial manner.
Modify the adventure to suit your tastes.
The adventure has no prescribed outcome. You can alter any encounter to make it more interesting and fun for your particular group of players.