In the following, we will present as well as reflect on the in-school piloting of our game "The Party". If you would like to find out more on the game, please see http://www.playful-pedagogy.org/the-party.html and/or www.playtheparty.weebly.com
Implementing "The Party" into the Classroom
On 12 May 2015, we were given the exceptional opportunity to pilot the prototype of our game “The Party” in a 4th grade of an Austrian high school. Designing an educational game sure has been a challenge, but getting the chance to actually try it out in a real-life school setting and get feedback from the learners was an extremely interesting experience. In the following, we will not only explain our lesson plan and teaching activities, but also reflect on the lesson and provide ideas for future implementations in schools.
Defining the lesson’s aims
As a first step in planning our teaching practice, we had to decide on the lesson’s aims and objectives, i.e. what we wanted the students to learn from the (gaming) experience. In the Austrian curriculum for History, we found the following topics that should be covered in the 4th class and were relevant to our game:
· how dictatorships are established
· how dictatorships function
· methods used by totalitarian regimes
· propaganda in totalitarian regimes
· the media’s influence on politics and society
While we feel that “The Party” could be used to introduce a multi-lesson unit including all of the above aspects, we had to reduce the lesson’s aims due to the fact that we “only” had 50 minutes at our disposal. Given that the game’s main purpose is the illustration of the media’s influence on political and social developments, we wanted to focus on the last three bullet points. Defining these points more precisely, we agreed on the following lesson aims:
At the end of our lesson, students should understand....
… how totalitarian regimes use media to establish themselves
… how totalitarian regimes use media manipulation
… how media can manipulate individuals and public opinion
… why individuals participate in totalitarian regimes despite not actually
advocating them
Developing a lesson plan
Piloting our game “The Party” in school was a great opportunity, and we were eager to create a motivating and fun learning experience for the students, the development of a meaningful and well-structured lesson plan thus being imperative. However, with a game that was initially created for introducing such a complex topic as “media manipulation” at the beginning of a new multi-lesson unit, designing just one meaningful and engaging 50-minute lesson was rather challenging, since we had to discard more than one draft for time-related reasons. However, since we consider some of the ideas we had to be quite valuable for teaching a multi-lesson unit on media manipulation, we will provide them in a separate subchapter below.
Rather than designing a lesson on media manipulation where we would just “squeeze in” the game, we wanted to make “The Party” the central element of our lesson. Considering that digital games could, in its widest sense, be regarded as a digital text (cf. Beavis et al. 2009: 169), we decided to use the three-part structure underlying almost every lesson that focuses on a specific text (e.g. reading or listening) and which consists of a pre-, while- and post-gaming activity (cf. Hedge 2000: 209). As for the pre-gaming activity, we both agreed that it would be best to just clarify a few key terms such as “party”, a word we were sure students would not immediately associate with politics, thus activating schematic knowledge and creating some expectations and interest by asking learners what a game called “The Party” could be about. The reason behind keeping the pre-gaming activity to a minimum was that we did not want to accidentally create bias by giving away too much of the game’s story or our own opinion on the topic.
Concerning the while-gaming, we agreed that the learners should play the game in pairs (i.e. one tablet per two students), so they could not only discuss their opinions and decisions, but also because we felt that playing a text-based game in a foreign language on one’s own might be too challenging, thus demotivating the students.
The design of the post-gaming activity, however, proved to be far more complicated. Since we did not know in advance what the students’ gaming results would be (remember that our game has two alternative endings) and thus could not decide on a very specific follow-up activity that would cater for a specific result only, we decided to prepare guiding questions for kind of information-gap discussions in groups of four, where students who got the first ending would explain it to those who had the second and vice versa - but what would happen if all (or all but one) student would get the same ending? In the end, we decided that, just as our game, our lesson plan would need alternative endings, and we finally agreed on the following:
Implementing "The Party" into the Classroom
On 12 May 2015, we were given the exceptional opportunity to pilot the prototype of our game “The Party” in a 4th grade of an Austrian high school. Designing an educational game sure has been a challenge, but getting the chance to actually try it out in a real-life school setting and get feedback from the learners was an extremely interesting experience. In the following, we will not only explain our lesson plan and teaching activities, but also reflect on the lesson and provide ideas for future implementations in schools.
Defining the lesson’s aims
As a first step in planning our teaching practice, we had to decide on the lesson’s aims and objectives, i.e. what we wanted the students to learn from the (gaming) experience. In the Austrian curriculum for History, we found the following topics that should be covered in the 4th class and were relevant to our game:
· how dictatorships are established
· how dictatorships function
· methods used by totalitarian regimes
· propaganda in totalitarian regimes
· the media’s influence on politics and society
While we feel that “The Party” could be used to introduce a multi-lesson unit including all of the above aspects, we had to reduce the lesson’s aims due to the fact that we “only” had 50 minutes at our disposal. Given that the game’s main purpose is the illustration of the media’s influence on political and social developments, we wanted to focus on the last three bullet points. Defining these points more precisely, we agreed on the following lesson aims:
At the end of our lesson, students should understand....
… how totalitarian regimes use media to establish themselves
… how totalitarian regimes use media manipulation
… how media can manipulate individuals and public opinion
… why individuals participate in totalitarian regimes despite not actually
advocating them
Developing a lesson plan
Piloting our game “The Party” in school was a great opportunity, and we were eager to create a motivating and fun learning experience for the students, the development of a meaningful and well-structured lesson plan thus being imperative. However, with a game that was initially created for introducing such a complex topic as “media manipulation” at the beginning of a new multi-lesson unit, designing just one meaningful and engaging 50-minute lesson was rather challenging, since we had to discard more than one draft for time-related reasons. However, since we consider some of the ideas we had to be quite valuable for teaching a multi-lesson unit on media manipulation, we will provide them in a separate subchapter below.
Rather than designing a lesson on media manipulation where we would just “squeeze in” the game, we wanted to make “The Party” the central element of our lesson. Considering that digital games could, in its widest sense, be regarded as a digital text (cf. Beavis et al. 2009: 169), we decided to use the three-part structure underlying almost every lesson that focuses on a specific text (e.g. reading or listening) and which consists of a pre-, while- and post-gaming activity (cf. Hedge 2000: 209). As for the pre-gaming activity, we both agreed that it would be best to just clarify a few key terms such as “party”, a word we were sure students would not immediately associate with politics, thus activating schematic knowledge and creating some expectations and interest by asking learners what a game called “The Party” could be about. The reason behind keeping the pre-gaming activity to a minimum was that we did not want to accidentally create bias by giving away too much of the game’s story or our own opinion on the topic.
Concerning the while-gaming, we agreed that the learners should play the game in pairs (i.e. one tablet per two students), so they could not only discuss their opinions and decisions, but also because we felt that playing a text-based game in a foreign language on one’s own might be too challenging, thus demotivating the students.
The design of the post-gaming activity, however, proved to be far more complicated. Since we did not know in advance what the students’ gaming results would be (remember that our game has two alternative endings) and thus could not decide on a very specific follow-up activity that would cater for a specific result only, we decided to prepare guiding questions for kind of information-gap discussions in groups of four, where students who got the first ending would explain it to those who had the second and vice versa - but what would happen if all (or all but one) student would get the same ending? In the end, we decided that, just as our game, our lesson plan would need alternative endings, and we finally agreed on the following:
Teaching the lesson
Despite our detailed planning, the lesson turned out completely different than we had planned to. After having introduced ourselves to the learners in English, we soon realized that the learners were not at the language proficiency level we had expected, and thus decided to teach the lesson in German instead. However, since “The Party” is exclusively based on (English) texts, this posed a major problem for the gaming experience itself, and many learners thus failed to correctly understand the game. Of course, we walked around and answered any questions there were, trying to help as much as we could, but this linguistic obstacle still largely contributed to a decrease of learners’ motivation. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see that many learners developed their own strategies to understand the game: other than asking the teachers or using dictionaries, one pair of students even translated the texts into Serbian before choosing an answer! Furthermore, it was interesting that, according to the teacher, the learners usually do not tend to actively try to overcome language problems themselves but rather ask the teacher – during the gaming experience, however, we actually found that the many learners applied their own techniques of overcoming the language problem. The video below will provide you with a general impression of the gaming experience itself:
Students play "The Party" in pairs while the teachers go around and answer any questions
Another problem was that we soon felt that the learners were not really interested in the topic of propaganda and political media manipulation. Thus, rather than using the follow-up questions we had prepared, we spontaneously decided to change the focus of the lesson from political education to a more general perception of media manipulation, and it was interesting to see that the more we moved away from the political aspect of media manipulation, the more learners were eager to participate. In the end, we asked the learners to get together in small groups of four and discuss advertisements or other instances of media manipulation that have already tricked them into believing what they heard/saw, and encouraged them to use their tablets to show these videos/etc. to each other. While they were doing so, we went around, discussed with the learners, answered questions, and, if appropriate in a specific group, even managed to discuss some of the aspects of political media manipulation we had initially planned to.
In groups of 4, students discussed instances of media manipulation from their personal lives
As you see, the lesson, despite having been successful in the sense that it was both a fun and meaningful learning experience to the students, turned out completely different than we had planned, which is why we provide the final lesson plan (i.e. the one illustrating the actual lesson) below:
Actual lesson plan
Reflection: Is “The Party” suitable for implementation into the classroom?
After having taught a lesson using “The Party” as a means of illustrating key concepts of media manipulation, we both feel that despite the lesson not having turned out the way it was intended to, “The Party” is definitely apt for being implemented into the (history) classroom. Many of the problems we encountered during the teaching experience were based on the fact that we had never met the class before and were thus not prepared to meet their needs – both in terms of language and interest in the topic. Therefore, we found that, contrasting our prior belief, “The Party” seems indeed to have a rather specific audience, not only in terms of language proficiency – which, in fact, might be easily overcome by publishing a German version of the game – but also content-wise. For instance, many of the learners (who were about 14 years old) had no idea what the term “underage drinking” could possibly mean – there was thus a clear lack of schematic knowledge, which, however, is essential for the successful negotiation of meaning (cf. Hedge 2000: 198).). To be honest, we had not considered that such issues might pose a problem to the successful implementation of the game into the classroom, and it was interesting to see how age and “world knowledge” affects the gaming experience in even such a simple game design. Thus, in future implementations, teachers should be aware of their learners’ age, interests and prior knowledge so as to ensure that the gaming experience is a meaningful one.
Nevertheless, by spontaneously adapting our initial lesson plan to our impressions about the learners’ interests, we still feel that we were successful in teaching a fun lesson in which students did acquire some knowledge on the topic of media manipulation. In fact, we even got a lot of very positive feedback on the game by the students, the only critique being the game’s language.
Feedback poster created by the students
Ideas for future Implementations
As we already stated above, there is a broad variety of possible learning activities that could be used with “The Party” if one has more than one 50-minutes-lesson at one’s disposal. In the following list, we would like to present some of the ideas we had to discard during the process of planning our own lesson, but which we would still like to share because we feel they are meaningful and fun activities on the topic of media manipulation to embed “The Party” in.
Firstly, if teaching a multi-lesson unit on media manipulation that is introduced by playing “The Party”, one could focus on the different strategies of media manipulation (e.g. the creation of a common enemy, not publishing negative information, censorship, etc.). This could be done, for instance, by asking learners to play the game again in small groups, trying to please The Party and discussing which strategies could be used to accomplish this goal. Afterwards, the whole class could be invited to collect their findings from the group discussion by writing them down on a poster. This initial brainstorming could then be organized into strategies and even sub-strategies so that in the end, the class would have created a kind of big handout on the topic.
When used the history classroom, “The Party” could – or even should – be followed by an analysis of real-life material (e.g. newspaper articles etc.) from a historical event/period that is appropriate and relevant to both the curriculum and the learners. So as to maintain the active position of the learners, this could be done in groups, where each group analyzes a different source, designs a poster (or, if the tablets the game was played on are still available, maybe even a Prezi-presentation or video!) and presents its findings to the whole class.
Since “The Party” focuses on media manipulation of written texts, we feel that follow-up activities, too, should at first be based on the written word so as to avoid overwhelming the students, but it is certainly a good idea to move on to the analysis of visual texts (e.g. posters/ videos) afterwards. Assuming that “The Party” was played on tablets that are still available after the gaming experience, learners could then be invited to use the tablet’s camera and a free photo editing website such as www.phixr.com (which does not require login or registration) to create their own propaganda posters. Similarly, when only focusing on written texts, students could be encouraged to write their own manipulated articles on topics that are relevant to their personal lives and which could then be collected into a newspaper. These activities maintain the learner in the role of active agents, thus encouraging “learning by doing”.
Final remarks
We hope that we could give you a good overview on our first in-school implementation of “The Party” as well as provide you with ideas for possible other ways of using this game in school. If you have any further questions or remarks to make, please do not hesitate to contact us via e-mail:
Iris Paur Philipp Thar
iris@paur.at p.thar@gmx.net
If you want to get more information on "The Party", please visit:
http://www.playful-pedagogy.org/the-party.html
If you want to play the game, please visit:
www.playtheparty.weebly.com
Bibliography
Beavis, Catherine; Bradford, Clare, Apperley, Thomas; O'Mara, Joanne; Walsh, Christopher. (2009) Literacy in the digital age : learning from computer games, English in education, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 162-175. URL: https://www.academia.edu/386001/Literacy_in_the_digital_age_Learning_from_computer_games
BMBF: Lehrplan AHS Unterstufe. Geschichte, Sozialkunde und Politische Bildung. Wien: BMBF, 2000.
https://www.bmbf.gv.at/schulen/unterricht/lp/ahs11_786.pdf
Hedge, Tricia. Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
