Gaming the Past

(to read DL Diary #2)

Last week, Cincinnati Country Day School (CCDS on Facebook) Design Lab ninth graders and I met for their first 75-minute sessions of Design Lab (3 classes on Wednesday and 1 on Thursday). We began with a reintroduction to the Agent-Based Problem Space Game (a.k.a Agential Problem Space a.k.a Historical Problem Space).

But first, some critical high school and educated-life skills. One of the core purposes of the Design Lab is to teach ninth graders and enable them to practice and develop durable skills including collaboration, problem-solving, design, research, and communication – all in alignment with Cincinnati Country Day School’s mission and strategic vision. Having taught historical game design in history classes for a couple of decades, I am already well aware how these skills are part and parcel of agential game design. But, as so many teachers do, I seize opportunities that arise on the go, in the classroom. More about this in a little bit. Here’s the overview of the class last week.

Metcognition and effective Note-Taking

First, I had the students write down the term “metacognition” and I talked with them about note-taking as a critical skill. I keep my definition of metacognition simple: thinking about one’s thinking or, more precisely in the learning context, thinking about one’s learning and making corrections as needed to succeed. In the context of note-taking metacognition for a ninth grader, three questions are critical, well four really. The first is to understand the ultimate purpose of the notes: a project, future demonstrated performance in a skill, an essay test, etc. But then, when taking notes from a teacher talk (or a trainer, coach, instructor, or employer), a note-taker should ask themself three questions:

1. Do I understand what the teacher is saying (i.e. general comprehension of what is currently said and has been said in this session)?
2. Do I understand why the teacher is saying or showing or doing precisely what they are saying or doing right at this moment (i.e. how does what the teacher is currently saying fit the overall purpose of the instruction; what is their point and how does it fit the point of the whole instruction)?
3. Have I written sufficient notes to retain and retrieve and use the information (assuming the answer to #1 and #2 is yes) not just tomorrow or next week but months from now?

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If the answer to #1 or #2 is “no” effective student metacognition suggests the most critical thing a student can do is ask their teacher a question. If the answer to #3 is “no” better notetaking is needed. For this class, I simply focused on getting students to capture the point of what I said without writing down word-for-word exactly what I said. It’s a basic principle of learning, one of the reasons, as I understand it, handwriting paraphrased notes is demonstrably more effective than typing verbatim notes. Verbatim notes do not require cognitive processing, just regurgitation. Effectively paraphrased notes require processing. As I like to tell my ninth graders, if they cannot put something into their own words, they cannot demonstrate they actually understand it (of course there are some exceptions; a well-drawn schematic, for example, could certainly show understanding)

Agent-Based Problem Space Games

We will spend a fair amount of time in the future working on notes, not least of all for researching game topics. This class we spent about 10-15 minutes. Then it was time to remind students about the Agent-Based Problem Space and see if their homework, brainstorming in about 150 words a quick APS for a ninth grade student trying to succeed in an academic quarter, fit that pattern as it was supposed to (we had to go fairly briskly; I hope for more class time in future years, but this is the prototype and we are balancing demands of other classes, workload, and so on, for the ninth graders). Again, if you would like more information about Historical Problem Spaces (which is just an past-focused Agent-Based Problem Space)

The diagram I projected is from Designing Historical Games for Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Educators.

Then it was time to introduce them to their second game case-study (King of Tokyo was the first at the Design Lab retreat session: see Design Lab Diary #2) : Roll through the Ages: The Bronze Age

The Durable Skill Benefits to Learning to Play Agential Problem Space Games

I have often thought from my experiences teaching history that learning to play even a modestly complex agent-based game like Roll through the Ages: The Bronze Age is an exercise in practicing durable skills. It is decidedly not the case, or at least has not been the case in my classes for the past 27 years, that students are all eager and able to learn to play a new game easily. This is especially true when it’s a strategy game, not least of all a boardgame strategy game, as opposed to a mobile game or a quick-twitch fps. I have written about this in various places for at least 16 years and made a point of it in Gaming the Past 1st and 2nd edition. Quite simply, it is an error to assume that a student who is required to play RTTA, a game they did not choose, that they may have no frame of reference for (think Candyland, Sorry, and Monopoly vs. RTTA, if they have played those boardgames), will enthusiastically and effortlessly learn a game as readily as a same age teen who wants to play RTTA for their own gratification and chose to play. Apples and oranges

So, one durable skill this experience helps practice is practical functional procedural learning. To learn to play a game sufficiently to both analyze and perform as a competent gameplayer with the other players in the game, one must apply information immediately or almost immediately after reception and use metacognition to monitor successful learning and application. This is a far different learning task in many ways from task of learning and performing from teacher direct instruction. With direct instruction, even under the best applications (with reflection opportunity and assessment for students along the way and at the end, for example) students commonly receive information, note it, and yet do not turn it into knowledge at that moment. And, indeed, they may not need to. A strong student can do this sometimes and readily go back later and turn the annotation into real knowledge. More importantly for the purposes of this example, the teacher may not know in that case that the student has not learned the piece of information at the point of instruction, has not turned it into knowledge at the time of direct instruction.

Learning a game, however, is a real-time learning problem. If the student does not turn the teacher’s instruction and materials (whether the initial how-to-play talk, quick guide handout, or answers and prompts during gameplay, all of which students received from me for RTTA) into knowledge right then and there, it becomes immediately apparent and has immediate impact. The student does not play the game correctly, and sometimes cannot even play at all.

So, getting practice at the learning required for board games is a durable skill development of learning procedures and their use. And excelling at learning procedures and their use is critical to most school, life, and job skills.

Durable Skill #2 inherent in effectively learning a strategy boardgame: effective collaboration

This leads to a second durable skill: effective collaboration. Now, effective boardgame play just requires effective collaboration in-and-of-itself. But I add an additional element that was in full force during this class. I encouraged the students to ask any questions they wanted: there are no silly questions. However, all questions had to be asked to the other students at the game table (the co-players) first and solved at the table first. Only if no one had a good answer/solution or there was significant disagreement could the table ask me. To emphasize this, I noted that if someone at the table did not understand something about the gameplay and someone else at the table did, the table had failed to collaborate. No one gets left behind in effective collaborative learning.

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We wrapped up the session with a quick overview of the agent-based problem spaced posed by RTTA and how the game created a word with people trying to solve problems. And though the students would not be designing games about the Bronze Age, they would be researching and designing agent-based games about people trying to tackle modern real-world problems. Tomorrow, students meet in 25 minute advisories to watch short videos on the four topics and then rank the topics in order of interest. By next week, they will be organized into their year-long collaborative groups and begin research.