education

With the school year about to start, I got to thinking about the games I always had with me in my class room. After 18 years of teaching, these were the ones I found myself going to over and over again. Over the next week or so I will be sharing my top 5…

The Game: Reverse Charades or Rollick

These games, Reverse Charades and Rollick are virtually identical owing to a split between the creators. Both won the Major Fun Award and they are both excellent choices. I tend to refer to the games interchangeably as Reverse Charades because the game of charades is recognized by my students. I’ll continue to do so here.

Reverse Charades is my go-to game for those unexpected deviations in the schedule: those times when your class is waiting to be called down for pictures or waiting for a speaker to show up or just when your lesson or class activity ended earlier than expected. I tend to introduce it early in the semester as a way to relax a bit with my students and let them perform. I have it on my phone, but I also keep several copies of Rollick in my room. The app version is well worth the investment.

The Set-up:

Reverse Charades is just like the classic game Charades except that the group does the acting and an individual does the guessing. For the past several years my class size was around 20 so splitting the class in half was doable. A class much bigger than 20 and you will probably need to make at least 3 teams. With teams of 10 I will have 7 actors and 3 guessers. The guessers always rotate out, and a student can’t become a guesser again until everyone on the team has been one.

You will also need to arrange a space between the actors and the guessers. A row of desks or a table or lines of tape on the floor will do. Over the course of the game, especially as the tension and excitement mount, there is a very strong tendency for the actors and guessers to move toward each other as if they will attack one another. I suggest keeping a space of 6 or 8 feet between the two groups—you can even deduct points if they violate the “neutral zone.”

Maybe it goes without saying but I will mention it anyways: this game is loud. There is no way to make it quiet without straight-jacketing the whole affair. Consider the classes around you, and be prepared to accept a certain degree of exuberance and chaos into your life.

When it is time to start, bring one group of actors up to the front. If you are playing with the physical game, give the timer to a student on the other team. Show the clues to the actors and then listen for the guessers to answer. Make sure the guessers say the answer and not the actors. You’ll also need to watch so that the actors aren’t mouthing words or using letters and numbers. Usually this is done accidentally or in the heat of the moment. A reminder usually works but subtracting a point can drive the point home if someone seems to be “forgetting” too much.

The Value:

At the risk of raising a gasp of astonishment from legislators and gasp of mock astonishment from everyone else, there are moments of “down time” in school. So far, it has proven impossible to structure each and every moment of each and every day. For which I say, “Thank goodness.”

Being playful is a hallmark of intelligence. It is one of the traits of our remarkable neural architecture. Not a by-product. Not a happy accident. Playfulness is not a product of intelligence so much as an aspect of it—much like the relationship between magnetism and electricity. Reverse Charades provides a lightly competitive way for my students to play with words and ideas and communication in a way that brings all of us closer together. Sure we all like scoring and winning, but we absolutely love laughing and acting and guessing. The important thing here is play and the engagement that occurs in its pursuit.

Now, maybe you need something a bit more academic—a justification that fits better with state standards. If that’s the case then consider the thinking and communication skills that are involved in a game of charades. The actor needs to understand the target word or phrase, in many cases must break the clue into discrete parts, and then must decide on the best physical clues to give in order for the guessers to get to the target. The guessers must attend to the physical actions of the pantomime as well as the actions that show them where to focus their attention. They must come up with multiple ways of expressing the actions and in most cases must then come up with synonyms in order to get to the exact wording. Indiana has the following standard for 11^th and 12^th graders:

Indiana Standard (Speaking and Listening) 11-12.SL.3.1: Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media and formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems…

This is a very basic standard that exists in almost all disciplines and across all grades. My guess is that your state has a standard that reads like this one (maybe even word for word given the way these standards often come to be written).

In general, I found that the more I got my students to just play with ideas in ways that made them laugh, the more likely they were to play and engage with the “serious” curricular materials.

Programming is one of those skills that many of my generation and older consider to be about as esoteric as alchemy. Hours of waving your hands over a table. Repeatedly typing thousands of lines of incomprehensible gibberish surrounded by symbols that we just assumed were there to create emoticons. And then… the glorious Technicolor splendor of the electronic universe opens up on our screens.

It’s MAGIC!!

I for one am thrilled that there are people out there who take the time to program our machines to perform any number of tasks. I don’t think I have much of that kind of creativity, but I recognize it as such. I also recognize that the reasoning and imagination that underlie coding are key components that we all need to develop in order to navigate our digital and analogue worlds. The logic of programming applies to business and creative writing and all the games we play.

In an effort to bring the kind of thinking that programming requires to younger audiences, ThinkFun has provided the world with the fantastic little board game Robot Turtles. The game, designed by Dan Shapiro, was successfully funded on Kickstarter. And when I say successfully I mean funded about 25 times Dan’s initial goal. Seriously. Check it out here.

And deservedly so. Robot Turtles is a great game that does a wonderful job of introducing young players in to the game mechanics. These game mechanics are also the basics of programming. It needs to be said that the game does not involve actually programming a computer. Instead, the game mechanics mimic the skills and reasoning that good programming requires.

The goal of the game is to move your turtle to your target gem. You have cards that you play in sequential order that tell your turtle to turn, move ahead, fire a laser, or repeat a series of actions. Each of these actions is introduced over a set of games that gradually increase the complexity of the tasks. This approach to teaching the game might be a little frustrating to older players but it makes the game accessible to very young children. The youngest players will appreciate just moving the turtle around the board. Once they have mastered basic sequential commands, they can progress on to more complex games. In the parlance of most computer games and role-playing games, they can level-up.

Adults could probably jump in to higher levels without playing the “tutorial” levels but this is designed to teach very young children. The pedagogy is solid and each level is fun.

Another aspect that I only appreciated after playing with my kids was the cooperative nature of the game. It can be competitive but it is not written that way. The game encourages you to play with pairs on each team—a young “Turtle Master” and an older “Turtle Mover.” The younger player chooses the cards and makes the decisions but does not actually move the turtle. That is the job of the “Turtle Mover.” In this way, the younger players get to order around the adults who are supposed to follow the instructions chosen by the kids (and provide entertaining sound effects). I’ve been a teacher for 18 years and it still took me by surprise just how exciting it was for the kids to boss around the adults. My daughter chose the cards and I did just what they told me to do. This was a great simulation of digital programming in which the programmer provides instructions that something else (the computer) has to follow.

The most interesting and complex cards were the function cards. These served as markers representing a set of action cards. The actions would always be carried out in the same way whenever a function card was played. For example, in order to turn around the turtle on the most basic level, a “programmer” would have to play two cards (right turn, right turn). At higher levels, the programmer could place two right turn cards and a function card off to the side. If the turtle ever needed to turn around in the game, the programmer would now only need to play one function card.

The game comes with three kinds of barriers which can impede the turtles. Ice blocks can be melted by a laser. Boxes can be pushed. Stone blocks are permanent. The instructions come with some suggested “maps” but you are encouraged to come up with your own challenges and then figure out how you can overcome them with the fewest moves.

Creativity is highly prized but so is efficiency.

The art and instruction are fantastic. The pacing is great for a very wide range of players, and the game play becomes remarkably robust after only a few instructional levels. This is Major Fun for kids and parents and teachers and anyone (like me) who sees that programming should be taught to everyone—neither for economic reasons nor for purely pragmatic reasons but rather because the skills are intrinsic to our development as a species.

And playing with them is fun.

And our new robot overlords are probably going to feed the programmers who brought them to life before they feed the humanities majors who keep churning out post-singularity dystopian fiction.

So maybe there are some pragmatic reasons…

2 – 5 players. Ages 4+