In an article written in 2006, Glynis Cousin describes threshold concepts as an excellent place to begin curricular design because they represent concepts which are central to mastery within a subject area (Cousin, 2006), and are often difficult to grasp.  Our plan is to use the idea of threshold concepts to help develop a framework for planning our respective games around a guided mastery approach.  To do this, we intend to follow a backwards design style of planning that has mastery of the target knowledge as the final threshold, then plan the steps to achieving that goal backwards towards a common entry point where students begin the learning process.  This is similar to how Joshua Danish (2014) explains the importance of describing the object for activity in that it identifies the role of intention in both shaping and understanding students’ actions, as well as the learning that students might glean from those actions.  In essence, if students know that the purpose of the workshop is the creation of an artefact, then the threshold concepts taught should reflect the critical steps necessary for the production of that artefact.  If we use our ‘epistemic games are a type of sport’ metaphor, then the threshold concepts represent the drills and theory necessary for the production of a goal, and can be seen as the essence of how a game is mastered.

 

Another key design feature that we’re using in planning our lessons is the idea of developing systemic knowledge with our students.  Since the goal of our respective designs is the manipulation of systemic knowledge towards the production of an artefact, it is relevant to plan threshold concepts that directly pertain to systemic knowledge in the field in which the artefact is produced.  Referring back to the Cousin (2006) article, there are a number of criteria which make threshold concepts easily identifiable.  They are transformative, irreversible, integrative, bound in conceptual space, and likely to involve troublesome knowledge.  Knowing this, we can look for threshold concepts in a given curriculum, or even in designing a new curriculum, then backwards design from our goal, through the threshold concepts needing mastery in order to attain that goal, in descending order of complication, to a starting point, and begin there.