Use gather town for social activities in your online seminar

Let’s just admit that it is nearly impossible to keep our students watching a monotonic speech for more than 20 minutes. As seminar organizers, we are battling for our audience’s attention against the entire universe of the good internet. One trick I found very helpful in creating an engaging seminar experience is to create interactive activities. In this blog, I will outline some steps of creating a speed-dating type of ice-breaking activity using Gather Town.

Gather town how-to

My colleague Derek Young introduced me to this wonderful tool called the Gather Town, which is a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and walk in, out and around those conversations just as easily irl. Below is a brief introduction on how to use gather town.

Tip 1: create a town space

Let’s first create a town space following the instructions on their webpage https://gather.town/private

Tip 2: log onto your town space

Launch the town url in a Chrome or Firefox browser. Note that Gather Town only supports the Chrome or Firefox browsers at this moment. You will be able to join the space using Safari or IE, but many features will be disabled.

To continue, enter the password:

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Allow gather town to use your camera and microphone:

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Type your name and hit the Join the Gathering! button:

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Tip 3: wandering around in the town

If this is your first time in the space, the system will prompt a two-step tutorial. The first step is to use your arrow keys or WASD to walk around the space.

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Tip 4: a first interaction with others

One really nice feature in gather town is that you can locate a specific participant by clicking on the locate button in their profile. Once the locate funciton is enablesd, gather town will dispay the shortest path on the screen to get to them. You can also send a private chat by pressing the chat button on the profile. If you want to send a global chat, you will change the setting in the chat box into global chat.

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Tip 5: heart up your avatar

I discovered this cute feature in gather town accidently – If you press Z on your keyboard, there will be a heart showing up on your avatar. You can ask your participants to “heart up” at the end of session to see how they like your activity and take a group selfie. Another way to use this is to highlight some of the participants in the breakout activities.

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Ice-breaking activity in Gather Town

Now you have the basics of how to use gather town. Let’s plan an ice-breaking activity! Here, I show an example of creating a speed-dating type of activity in our deparment’s open house. The participants are faculty and students of math/stat.

Step 1: Before entering gather town

We use zoom as an initial meetup place for sending out the gather town link and an introduction on how ot use gather town. The students will first be splitted into small groups using the breakout room funciton on zoom. Each breakout room will be assigned a number.

Step 2: Faculty join gather town first

While the students are in the breakout room over zoom doing initial introduction of themselves, the faculty members will exit zoom and join gather town. Each of them will be given a number, and they will include this number in their displayed name. The faculty member will spread out in the town space, and use the Z button to highlight their avatar.

Step 3: Students join gather town

After the faculty members are ready, the students will join the town space. They will use the assigned number and the locate feature to find their assigned faculty.

Step 4: Speed-dating type group discussion

The group together with the faculty member will have 5-10 minutes to discuss an ice-breaking question, e.g., what is your biggest hope/fear for learning math/stat this semester. The students will have 1 minute to think on their own and write their answer in the local chat. One trick I learned from my colleague Jessica Sidman is to have students hit the send button all at the same time. I thought that was a really fun experience. Then the faculty member will discuss what the students have submitted, and offer them some words of insights.

When the time is up, the admin will post a message in the global chat for a new number assignment.

The students move to the newly assigned faculty to discuss other ice-breaking questions, e.g., what advice would you give yourself when you were first year in college.

Some example ice-breaking questions:

  1. my all time favorite: what is your biggest hope/fear for learning math/stat this semester
  2. Two Truths and a Lie
  3. Talk about your favorite theorem/algorithm
  4. What advice would you give yourself when you were first year in college

Step 5: Repeat the steps for a few rounds

Repeat the Step 4 for a few rounds, and the remaining time will be used for mingling.

Written on August 21, 2020