One roadblock to implementing games in the classroom and library involves aligning the skills involved to the state and national standards that guide instructional experiences. To help with implementing board games and card games in the curriculum, here are five different ways games align with key standards across a variety of subjects in the areas of reading, writing, and speaking – each with an example of a game that meets the standards!
1. Best Practices for Persuasive Speaking (ELA Speaking & Listening – 10.4-10.6)
Many board and card games challenge players to win by convincing a judge to pick their creative idea, whether it is a combination of cards, a unique sketch, or even filling in the blanks on a humorous response. With this higher-order challenge built into a playful premise, students love these types of activities, and it helps them develop the English/Language Arts Common Core Standard of persuasive speaking and writing!
Take Gamestormers, for instance. In Gamestormers, players design a narrative using five cards they acquire during the round. They then share about their five-card narrative, aiming to impress the judge with how their game weaves each card together and why it is clever, unique, or otherwise stands out among the other ideas.
2. Connect Evidence from Texts/Research to Create Visuals (History/SS, Science & Tech Writing – 8.6, 8.9)
One of the most intriguing uses of games in teaching and learning are the potential for students to actually remix the game itself to demonstrate their own understanding of concepts. Take, for instance, our blank card templates for both Doomscroll and Gamestormers. Students can take the blank Doomscroll “Post” templates and create social media posts from the perspective of historical figures, fictional characters, and more to showcase how they might have interacted with others online today.
For our Gamestormers blank cards, students could create an interconnected system of not only concepts, characters, and real figures in history, but they can use metaphorical thinking to demonstrate how various ideas interact with each other. For instance, what powers would various parts of the cell have in the same game ecosystem? What would be the “currency” in that game? Energy? Protein? Do you need to have certain cards to use others? All of these questions in designing a collection of game cards pushes students to demonstrate how they see the terms and concepts in a larger context rather than simply vocabulary to memorize.
3. Teaching and Inspiring Narrative Writing (ELA Writing – 6-12.3A, D, E)
A common feature of many board, card, and video games is a rich storyline or even entire worlds drawn from high-interest topic areas such as civilizations, fantasy, science fiction, and more! Often, students find narrative writing to be an intimidating task, but games and game worlds provide them with an opportunity to tap into the game’s backstory for inspiration.
In Gamestormers, students can play our easy-to-learn and fast-to-play party game where each student uses five cards from the game world to describe a short narrative to a judge. The judge for the round then picks the person with the most engaging story! After playing a few rounds, students can then select one of the narratives they told or one they heard and use it to begin a freewrite. Topics include writing a day in the life of someone from the world, continuing the narrative beyond what they shared, or filling in the gaps from the story they could not describe during the allotted time.
4. Analyzing and Synthesizing Information Represented in a Game Compared to Other Texts ((History/SS, Science & Tech Reading 9-12.7, 9)
As more and more games tackle real-world topics such as international politics, managing the big-picture operations of a startup, or even balancing chemical equations, the opportunity to analyze them as texts and learning media aligns effectively with reading standards. In the context of our social media literacy game, Doomscroll, students take on the perspective of a company aiming to keep users on their platform in order to sell them products via ads. Imagine pairing Doomscroll with a documentary on social media such as The Social Dilemma, or connecting the card game with research from the National Institute of Health or American Psychological Association.
We specifically pair Doomscroll with a series of debrief questions to help students grapple with the context of the game, their role in the game, and how the game chooses to represent various considerations for social media companies in real life. Through the discussion, students get the opportunity to not only analyze Doomscroll as a text for information about social media, but also can compare/contrast it to other texts they’ve experienced on the same topic.
5. Connecting Visuals to Concepts and Vocabulary (History/SS Literacy 6-8.7)
One of the best ways to reinforce vocabulary and key concepts from a course is to connect it to visual stimuli. Research shows that visual cues and imagery can help us better remember and understand details we learn, and games provide many opportunities to use images in connection with topics students study.
In Gamestormers, for instance, there are numerous visuals to use for vocabulary retention. The game comes with five visual dice with unique images each. Students can roll the dice and then connect the resulting images rolled to the vocabulary and concepts from the course. In addition, the 139 card with beautiful art provides a chance for learners to draw 3-4 cards and align the visuals with what they’ve learned as well.
Amazingly enough, those were just five of our FAVORITE ways to connect to the standards. We have other lessons that connect to Social Studies, Math, and more!
To see our standards in a slick infographic, you can get the Games and State Standards Visual via the link or see it below:
