Play Cafe: Are you Game? An Event hosted by The Yale Center for Health & Learning Games
On March 8th, the team had the pleasure of entertaining a gang of 23 kids in our ever-popular annual event, the PlayCafe! This is a special event in the Yale Pathways to Science series for kids in grades 6-8.
We partnered with our sister lab, play2PREVENT, and had a group of 8 kids playing smokeSCREEN on iPads, a group of 8 kids playing Invite Only VR on Oculus Gos, and lastly a group of 8 kids either playing or watching others play Beat Saber on the Oculus Quest! Needless to say, our whole office was crawling with kiddos! We had them playing in the offices, we had them in the lobby, we had them in the hall, we even had them in the kitchen!
These activities allowed our visitors to have the chance to learn about the work we create in the Yale Center for Health and Learning Games, but also to experience some of the best of VR. We think Beat Saber on the Quest is a great and approachable way to showcase VR for all ages. There were some really experienced Beat Saber players competing with each other to get the highest score, and some kids who had never before tried VR but were still having an absolute blast in Beat Saber’s No Fail mode.
At the end of the day, we wrote down everyone’s best score on the eponymous song, “Beat Saber,” and gave out one of our limited edition Invite Only T-shirts as a prize to our highest scoring kid.
One thing that struck us this year was that most of the kids had tried VR at least once, and many of them in fact owned their own headsets. This was a pretty striking difference from previous years when most people had only tried VR demos, if that. Next year we hope to break out our new Alcohol Prevention/Harm Reduction game and again wow the kids with new technology–the Magic Leap!