Our first annual Survival Bootcamp “orientation” is on!
Today’s emergency medical simulations armed our students with an arsenal of first aid skills that will equip them to treat their peers and teachers in the event of a shooting. A highlight of Day 1 was our “Make Your Own Stretcher” challenge. Teams of five students competed to assemble a stretcher out of everyday classroom objects such as clothing, duct tape, and broomsticks. Each team then worked to safely transport an “injured” member of the group to our school’s Safe Zone without dropping or jostling them. Congratulations to today’s Bootcamp Champs, pictured above. This team finished with an impressive time of only 10 minutes 36 seconds!
#butlerstrong #backtoschool #readyforschool #middleschool #orientation #bootcamp #firstaidtraining #games #gamesforchange #games4ed #learningmadefun #solutionsnow #schoolsafety #armmewith #gonebutneverforgotten
— August 7, 2018
In a post-mass shooting world where schools are tasked with preparing their teachers and students for the possibility of mass school shootings, could Survival Bootcamps that teach students first aid, active shooter drills, and social-emotional skills become the new normal for back-to-school orientations?
Our team was inspired by emergency preparedness materials like this earthquake safety manual from Shakeout.org, which helps schools and organizations nationwide prepare for earthquakes. We asked ourselves: If we continue to apply band-aid solutions to the problem of school gun violence instead of passing commonsense gun legislation, would a dystopian future include EMT-type orientations where students would be required to learn how to make tourniquets, build makeshift stretchers, and stop bleeding?
After publication of our Instagram novella, we learned from The Young Turks investigative reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has issued a $1.8 million grant in order to create a program, School-Age Trauma Training, to provide “lifesaving trauma training to high school age students for mass casualty events.” So, now, DHS’s Stop the Bleed campaign is now extending to high school students.
The Department of Homeland Security grant opportunity states:
Uncontrolled bleeding is the number one cause of preventable death from trauma. This initiative is designed to enhance a bystander’s ability to take decisive, lifesaving action to assist victims with traumatic injuries. The training is intended to provide the knowledge necessary to stabilize the injured and until first responders arrive on the scene. The effort is aimed at a broad youth-based approach through public/private schools, not-for-profit organizations, faith-based and other civic communities of interest. This high school centric training initiative is designed to enhance a bystander’s ability to take decisive, lifesaving action to assist victims with traumatic injuries. The training is intended to provide the knowledge necessary to stabilize the injured and control severe bleeding until first responders arrive on the scene. The training provides research-validated guidance to stop uncontrolled bleeding from traumatic injuries using materials readily found at an incident or worn by the victim and citizen responders. The primary target audience is high school age students.
Turns out our story is not so dystopian after all.
How could Day 2 of our middle school’s Survival Bootcamp not be a rousing success with our school-wide game of Hide and Peek?
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Rules:
1. Teams of 5 students each were challenged to come up with one creative hiding spot somewhere in the school building
2. One member of each team was sent to hide in the location of their team’s choosing
3. Hiders attempted to evade detection by a faculty search squad for a period of 30 minutes
4. Teams whose members escaped notice were crowned our Day 2 Bootcamp Champs!
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Congratulations to Zach Rivera, one of today’s Bootcamp Champs, pictured above. He hid in a locker in the 6th grade hallway and escaped notice for 33 minutes!
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Today’s challenges aimed to test each student’s endurance, creativity and reaction time through playful simulations of an active shooter event. Although we sought to maintain an atmosphere of teamwork and fun during today’s competitions, the games nevertheless illuminated how critical each student’s decisions and ability to keep still can be during a crisis. We are sure that the introduction of the MELISSA Method ™ will continue to train our students with these skills.
#butlerstrong #backtoschool #middleschool #orientation #bootcamp #hideandseek #games #gamesforchange #gamebasedlearning #schoolshooting #solutionsnow #protectouryouth #armmewith #notonemore #gonebutneverforgotten
—August 8, 2018
During the Holocaust, hiding games were a matter of life and death, as Ida Fink’s short story The Key Game illustrates. It is about a game a young boy plays with his parents. Children in concentration camps and ghettos played dark survival games such as Gas Chamber, Gestapo Agent, Burial, and Slaughter with each other.
Such types of child’s play would likely be red-flagged and classified as inappropriate, dangerous, or forbidden in schools today, but the fact is that children throughout history have turned to playacting and roleplay as a way of coping with trauma.
In a Los Angeles Times interview, George Eisen, Holocaust survivor and author of “Children and Play in the Holocaust” and a physical education teacher who has studied the sociology of sports says, “Games in any culture are an important means to understanding reality. Playacting came to provide a naturally reflective mirror of all the sorrows, dismay and absurdity of the children’s brief existence.”
Even today, games continue to be a critical part of childhood, and there is no more classic childhood game than hide and seek. In the world of William Butler Middle School where a surviving a mass shooting is part of their lexicon, the children who are asked to play a timed and structured game of hide-and-peek are no different than the children of the Holocaust, for whom timed hide and seek was a very real game of survival.
Our final day of Survival Bootcamp ended with a day of video games. Students played collaborative learning games like School Shooters where they selected their favorite fish avatar joined other students to build an impenetrable wall of “school of fish” to defend themselves from being blotted out by the ink from a giant squid. The highlight of the day, however, was VR Ball, where they played a three-way virtual reality game of soccer and learned an important lesson about empathy.
After a few rounds, the game is designed to exclude the player from receiving the ball, making them become a bystander to the group they were once a part of. During gameplay, our trained instructors observed and recorded each player’s nervous system response to being excluded.
At the end of the day, the real purpose of the game and the impact of exclusion on students’ nervous systems were revealed in an all-school assembly. Through the experience of walking in the shoes of someone who was ostracized, we hope that our students took away a deeper understanding of the pain of social exclusion and that, as a result, the experience of VRBall will help our community build a kinder and more inclusive community at our school. #bekind
#butlerstrong #backtoschool #middleschool #orientation #bootcamp #empathy #virtualreality #games #gamesforchange #gamebasedlearning #mentalhealthawareness #schoolshooting #solutionsnow #gonebutneverforgotten
—August 9, 2018
Our game of VRBall was inspired by Cyberball, a ball toss game that was designed by students and researchers at Purdue University, UCLA, and the University of Texas to research “ostracism, social exclusion, or rejection. It has also been used to study discrimination and prejudice.” Their study found that “as far as your brain is concerned, a broken heart is not so different from a broken arm.”
The American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology reports:
As researchers have dug deeper into the roots of rejection, they’ve found surprising evidence that the pain of being excluded is not so different from the pain of physical injury. Rejection also has serious implications for an individual’s psychological state and for society in general. Social rejection can influence emotion, cognition and even physical health. Ostracized people sometimes become aggressive and can turn to violence. In 2003 Leary and colleagues analyzed 15 cases of school shooters, and found all but two suffered from social rejection (Aggressive Behavior, 2003).
The Cyberball story shows us that the pain of rejection or being excluded is not very different from that of physical pain, and when exclusion happens online, it is just as damaging as being excluded from a real-life clique.(Click here to watch a video of one participant’s reaction to being ostracized from a VRBall game.)
Video games have gotten a bad rap in the dialogues around gun violence, and what is not often discussed is the existence of video and learning games that have been designed to and proven to build empathy.
After publication of our Instagram story about VRBall, we learned that the Center for Healthy Minds, a research institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Learning Games Network announced the positive research results of a game that was purposefully designed to build empathy in middle schoolers.
Results published August 7, 2018 in npj Science of Learning (a Nature journal) reveal for the first time that, in as few as two weeks, kids who played a video game designed to train empathy showed greater connectivity in brain networks related to empathy and perspective taking. Some also showed altered neural networks commonly linked to emotion regulation, a crucial skill that this age group is beginning to develop, the study authors say.
