My students are wizards, bards, druids and paladins

Nowadays, gamification is becoming more and more popular in classrooms. Teachers are trying to introduce different games in their lessons like Guess who? or Dobble. But what if teachers could create a role-playing game with their pupils?

Teaching with games - My experience

I’ve been a private lesson teacher for almost 8 years now and I usually use games in order to make my lessons more fun and my students active learners and not only puppets faking that they are listening to me. My first experience using “games” was teaching Spanish syntax. I tried to make the process of identifying the different adjuncts and arguments of the verb funny. Obviously, I didn’t use a game per se in the explanation of the components but we ended even doing a Kahoot! About syntax. The student who had the best score will win some candy (I know, I know, I’m not a healthy teacher).

Nonetheless, I'm trying to improve my gamification lessons because I think that it is very difficult to do it well and sometimes I made some mistakes but it's ok as I try to learn from them!

Role-playing games in class: a possibility?

I'm a huge fan of role-playing games. I've been playing them since I was 14 years old and I'm still playing today. Due to this, one day I thought about trying to make an RPG with a few students since I have a lot of fun playing these games. I chose the game called Vampire: the Masquerade to create two little vampires who had to pass some puzzles, games and tests about English language in order to defeat the villain of the game. These games, puzzles, etc. were strictly related to the content they saw that week in class. They acknowledged to me that they had had a great time! (and they also had such a high note in the final exam of the subject so their parents were happy too!).

Obviously, this was an experiment and I didn't expend the whole lesson doing this because I didn't know if it would work or not and I wanted them to pass their exams. Nonetheless, I think that they internalized better the contents when they had to think about who to pass the different puzzles. But, could this be possible in a high school class with around 30 students? I have mixed thoughts.

On the one hand, I think it would be very time consuming as you have to create the different characters that will challenge them with the different games, puzzles and tests as well as those games. Moreover, you'll need the endorsement of the centre you're working in as well as student's motivation to do it.

On the other hand, I think it could be possible to create a role-playing game as a part of the class. I mean, maybe you can dedicate one of the first lessons to divide the class in groups or maybe 4/5 students and they create one character for the game that will represent them. Having created the character, you can maybe do a final activity when you finish a lesson in which you play your character. Despite this, I think that students should feel rewarded when they complete the different tasks so maybe I would create a system of recompense. In this case, nonetheless, I would use a system based in Dungeons and Dragons as each group can be a different character (druid, paladin, wizard, witch, orc...) and not all vampires.

Example of Dungeons and Dragons' starter kit

To sum up, I would really love to include a role-playing game in my future lessons and I hope that I can include it as gamification is becoming so popular nowadays. Nonetheless, if I'm not able to do it, I won't lose hope to do it in the future! Don't forget that teachers are nerds too!