Hiding the Vegetables: Role-playing, Games, and Simulations
By Michael Canterino ’03, Upper School English Teacher, Hackley School
While this academic school year offers Hackley’s first course explicitly designed around role-play gaming as the central mechanism for understanding, analyzing, and creating content, games and simulations have been a tradition in Hackley classrooms for years.
Go back in time to the 1990s, and walk into the basement of Symmes Hall — you’ll find Mr. Fitz’s seventh-grade class debating the merits and flaws of one- and two-house legislatures as members of the Constitutional Convention. Climb two flights of stairs, and you’ll hear students planning a road trip across the U.S. — accounting for gas, food, lodging, and entertainment — in Mr. Gutheil’s sixth-grade math class.
Walk through Hackley hallways today, and you’ll find role-playing, games, and simulations in all academic departments, across all divisions, during class, after school, and on the weekends in the chapel. Over these last few years in particular, Hackley’s gaming tradition has taken a more active role in the classroom and the community, with the Hackley Game Club, a gaming iGrant developing classroom practices, and this upcoming spring, Hackley will host its third annual NYSAIS conference on role-playing, games, and simulations for teachers and administrators at surrounding independent schools.
Ask students and alumni to recall their gaming experiences at Hackley, and you’ll be regaled with stories about zombie invasions and World War I dogfights during after school programs, creating and breeding curly-horned caterpillars in seventh-grade genetics labs, political back-channeling and multilateral peace treaties being struck over lunch in the dining hall — as well as the day the Black Death came to the sixth grade’s village during history class. “The Black Death is a good one, as morbid of a topic as it is,” sixth- and ninth-grade history teacher, Jared Fishman recalls. “It’s definitely the simulation kids come back remembering.”
This year marks Mr. Fishman’s twelfth year at Hackley, running games and simulations in his history classes as well as coordinating and running programs for the Hackley Game Club and After School Knowledge program (ASK). He recalled how the Black Death simulation was already a staple of the sixth-grade curriculum: “My mentor teacher, Mr. Fitz, already had experience doing this Black Death simulation…and it was great because the kind of academic work the students were doing in their reading and for homework had a direct impact on their decision-making in the simulation.”
A key to this decision-making — and role-play gaming itself — stems from character creation: constructing a narrative point-of-view through which a student can view the material. “One thing that Jared and I have done is create scenarios that are grounded in a historical event,” Mr. Fitz says. “But from there, it’s the kids who have to come up with what their character’s response is — and that’s fun because you get the kids to react to the historical ‘stuff.’” Role-playing characters can safeguard students who are trying out ideas or actions for the first time, encouraging risk-taking and accepting the potential for failure.
workshop for fellow educators.
In terms of the value games and simulations bring into classrooms, co-author of Hackley’s gaming iGrant, Peter Sawkins, cites the growing and well-supported research that game play of all different kinds can help enhance traditional educational pedagogy. “The process of learning from experience can improve memory, problem-solving, logic, and pattern recognition,” Mr. Sawkins says. “And one of the very important elements of experiential learning — and specifically the incorporation of games into teaching methodology — is that it can be applied across different subjects, ages, and grade ranges.”
Middle-School science teacher and Hackley Game Club faculty member, Emma Olsen sees a whole other level of engagement from her students: “I get different kids. They have a personal stake in the lesson, and I think that’s really the value of gaming in science because it’s so easy to be totally removed from what you’re learning […] because the material can be abstract or microscopic things you can’t perceive. So for kids who struggle to visualize what an imbalance of carbon in the atmosphere might look like, our climate cycle game is a very real way to experience it.”
These sorts of experiences can be transformative for students, not only when it comes to learning new material, but when it comes to understanding the real-world impacts and conversations about that material. When reflecting on the previously-mentioned seventh-grade genetics lab in which students create and breed fictional caterpillar “Villagers,” Mrs. Olsen says that the simulation is “a stepping stone to talking about a more difficult topic. But now that they’ve experienced what [genetic selection] looks like, they have more context. They always think CRISPR gene editing is really cool, but they don’t understand why people are so hesitant to introduce genetic technology — but when you can point out to them that they were just doing selective breeding with their caterpillars, and then ask them what would they think about doing it with people, they’re horrified by that — so now you can have a more in-depth discussion about genetic selection.”
