Playing the Game ... An edcation love story ...

I share the following in the hopes that my experiences may be helpful to others and the community can offer suggestions for my next steps. 

I was recently drafted into starting up an Alternative Education Program that is associated with our adult education program. We started as a team of 6 teachers planning and trying to populate the "classroom" with at least two teachers each of the 5 days a week we had students. We would have two different teachers in each day and there was no consistency with which two teachers were in on any day given our crazy adult education schedules an the part time nature of most of our staff. Due to financial issues, logistics and in an effort to provide more consistency for the learners our group is now down to one teacher. I guess I just drew the shortest straw or I am the lucky one 

As anyone who has worked with at risk youth knows, getting learners to show up is considered a success and then if you can get them in engaging in anything, you have some momentum you can start using. After weeks of many attempts at engagement with almost complete failure with the myriad of offerings presented, I turned to games and have had some experiences others may appreciate as they work with adult learners that struggle with engagement issues. 

Right now, my at risk students are engaging in 2-3 hours of game play / study without asking for a break. This is a huge divergence from the previous 3-5 minute attention span and associated behavioral "breaks" that were constant in that same time frame. I have been using a few games so far and will be branching out more as my system continues to grow. Please note that the following is aimed at learners that have only attended class <50% of the time in the past and have had almost no academic engagement in other educational efforts. It's a start only...

Game 1: Mancala - I have three mancala boards with beads and I used these to help build logic, the concept of patterns and sequences, and flexibility of thinking. Students have spent a couple weeks of just getting to know the game, but half of the students are now getting into the metagame and the variation rules that completely change the thinking involved. We play the games in a way that has each person is verbally sharing their thinking and strategy which has really intensified the processing students are engaging in. While learning, a student might rely on the opponent missing an opportunity or not seeing a trap that was set. Now, with the verbal sharing, the students are getting comfortable with sharing their plans because their game choices are forcing opponents into difficult choices. Four weeks into the program, learners are now starting to investigate ways to defend against the various strategies learners have derived to attack in the game. 

Game 2: Plague Inc - This is a digital game that most students can get on their tablets/phones and online for free (or $1 app purchase on Apple OS I think). I have the full version available on my computer and whomever is playing has it on projector so others can observe and discuss strategies. The game has learners taking on the role of a bacteria that aims to kill all of humanity. Learners must mutate three components of their lives to ensure those pesky humans don't cure the world of the player's influence. Players build up ways they can increase infection, ways they can damage humans, and ways they can build resistances to temperatures or drugs. I have students now starting to record what part of the world they start in, what the results of their simulation were, and some other data that is easily posted at the end of the game. My hope is to get the players recording their choices in a written journal at some point, but thus far, none of these challenging students wish to write anything yet  The sharing of strategies and learning experiences has developed nicely with this experience and I continue to derive ways to keep that energy moving into more academic ventures. Increased successes are allowing students to try other potential types of outbreaks other than bacteria. Getting to comparing and contrasting those experiences will open up to many science and mathematical explorations with some historical investigations to follow I hope. 

Game 3: Civilization V: This is a turn based simulation in which each student is the leader of a race of people. Each civilization starts at the beginning of time with very few technologies known and only a couple of human resources available. Through all of this, the leaders must balance their people's health, happiness and the spread of their population around the world. The goal is to grow your civilization in the areas of Science, Economy, Military, Culture, Politically, and even the influence of Religion is factored in. Players "win" by being the first to build a colony ship in space, politically being elected ruler of the world, culturally assimilating a majority of the world's population, military domination and a few other more difficult means. In short, every player can with in a number of ways that vary quite differently from the choices of others.  

Of course, my room full of 16 and 17 year old boys gravitated immediately to military but they quickly learned that the cost economically, politically, happiness wise and in general resource consumption was way too high to continue to pillage all in sight. They are now just getting used to the interface and options to the point where we will be doing a reset by the end of the week where each person can choose from the tons of choices as to which of the world's civilizations the player wishes to choose. I have compiled the game related information on each civilization available and the details in this document are all game based. An online reviewer's notes are given for each civilization and learners will be challenged to take on a civilization the reviewer deemed "weaker" to prove them wrong.  I will eventually push to have students researching the real civilization history to compare and contrast their game play decisions to decisions they feel the real leaders in history may have responded. This is an end goal and will need to be built up over time with this crew of students. 

To help start that process, I wanted to encourage journalling of player's decisions. Having them write down on paper their choices was met with absolute resistance, so I crafted this tally sheet yesterday and will be introducing the process soon. The sheet allows players to simply put an X in every action they engaged in during their turn. My plan is to dive into math analysis of this data by simply asking students to compare the in game scores and success graphs (tons of visual graphs available in game) to the data trends they see in each player's engagement sheet. Asking the question, "What patterns produce the highest scores and most success?" will hopefully get them processing tables and graphs of tons of variables that go into how successful a civilization is in the game. Ideally, slipping in how this processing relates to standard algorithms, symbols, language and procedures could happen over time without the learners even realizing they are "doing math" as experts. 

The turns are set on a timer so no student is taking more than a few minutes on their turn. One student sits in the "hot seat" in front of my computer at a time.  While waiting for their next turn, the students are engaging in their individualized plan of activities I provided each learner. There has been much interest in watching other player's turns in this first week we started and I have allowed that because the game does have so many elements and the discussions have been rich. I interview each student privately to discuss their choices, goals and concerns for their civilization and after three sessions the thinking has gone from "Kill them all !!!!" to a very thoughtful analysis of what their options are and what they hope to do. About half the players are even to the point of justifying the changes they wish after so many turns. If only I could get them to write this down. I have them talking with me openly now with depth. The next step will be slipping in the voice to text feature in Google Docs to record our conversations so we start having a written record they can use for reflection. Combined with the data sheet I am introducing, students will begin having some rich discussions about how data correlates to success and the different decisions each leader makes to keep their people happy, healthy, thriving and alive.

It has taken four weeks (seems like months really) to get these students from behaviorally challenged and disengaged students, constantly looking for any excuse to get in trouble in the hopes of getting kicked out, to the point in which all learners are engaging for 2+ hours in active mental engagement. Slowly, over time I will be working with each individual to directly relate their content area goals into their game play by offering challenges and questions within their game play that will hopefully drive the learner to want to know more of what we might teach in a conventional setting. So far, the engagement in thinking critically and the communication of those thoughts with peers and with me has been so impressive this last week. All students are attending over 60% now with over half the class only missing 2 or less days in the last 4 weeks. This marked improvement in students attendance is valuable because we all know how important it is to get learners to even show up consistently. 

What are your thoughts with the brief outline of what we have tried to do with some very challenging learners that have been mostly discarded in other venues? Do you have "difficult" learners that might engage in constructive game play in a way that you could harness and direct any momentum into critical learning you expect? Do you have ideas of how I might take "next steps" in any of the three games offered above? 

I can share that I have a slew of other games (many of them cooperative board games) that will be introduced in the next few weeks. These games are all very heavy in STEM thinking and processing while being adictively engaging and social. If people wish, I can try to continue to post materials I build up to go with each game idea and the supplemental materials I make with the three games presented above. My hope is that others may get ideas and want to play along. I am sure some of you talented educators will have other materials that you create to extend the game play into learning in a way that slowly sneaks in higher level learning in more traditional content topics. I have studied games my whole life and have had the belief we can teach much through purposeful game play. After three weeks of failures with my Alt Ed learners, I felt there were very few options left to try so I am now getting to put my education through game play theories to test. A week or two into the process, I have much excitement and hope that this might actually be helpful in getting my learners to explore tons of curriculum content without it even feeling like school. Can you help offer some ideas and thoughts?