I’ve been telling every­one who will lis­ten about Paul Waelchli’s work map­ping the ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Stan­dards to skills used to play pop­u­lar videogames. I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to do the same thing for school libraries, and now we have our first step towards that goal because Brian Mayer has mapped New York State’s edu­ca­tion stan­dards to some mod­ern board games.

Gam­ing, School Libraries and the Curriculum

“Games engage stu­dents with authen­tic leisure expe­ri­ences while rein­forc­ing a vari­ety of social, lit­er­ary and cur­ric­u­lar skills. When an edu­ca­tional con­cept is intro­duced and rein­forced dur­ing a game, it is inter­nal­ized as part of an enjoy­able expe­ri­ence and fur­ther uti­lized as one aspect of a strat­egy to attain success.

Games also carry other ben­e­fits. They help stu­dents con­nect and build social skills, work­ing as part of a team or nego­ti­at­ing the most advan­ta­geous sit­u­a­tion for them­selves. It also pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for stu­dents to to explore a host of life skills not inher­ent in the cur­ricu­lum , but impor­tant for suc­cess. Some of these include: micro-managing resources and options; actively re-evaluating, re-prioritizing and re-adjusting goals based on uncer­tain and shift­ing sit­u­a­tions; deter­min­ing accept­able losses in an effort to obtain an end goal; and employ­ing ana­lyt­i­cal and crit­i­cal skills to more authen­tic social experiences.

Here is a list of NYS stan­dards cur­rently sup­ported by a well estab­lished school game library:

NYS Social Stud­ies Standards:

• Stan­dard 3: Geog­ra­phy Stu­dents will use a vari­ety of intel­lec­tual skills to demon­strate their under­stand­ing of the geog­ra­phy of the inter­de­pen­dent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the dis­tri­b­u­tion of peo­ple, places, and envi­ron­ments over the Earth’s surface.
  • Ten Days In.. Series
  • Ticket to Ride Series
     
• Stan­dard 4: Eco­nom­ics Stu­dents will use a vari­ety of intel­lec­tual skills to demon­strate their under­stand­ing of how the United States and other soci­eties develop eco­nomic sys­tems and asso­ci­ated insti­tu­tions to allo­cate scarce resources, how major decision-making units func­tion in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an econ­omy solves the scarcity prob­lem through mar­ket and non-market mechanisms.
  • Catan Series
  • Puerto Rico” [<a href=http://librarygamer.wordpress.com/”>Library Gamer]

Sev­eral more are listed in the post, so please click through to see just how good a fit this can be.

If you still ques­tion whether there are lit­era­cies (espe­cially information-related ones) involved in play­ing videogames, ask your­self if those same things hap­pen around play­ing board games. If your answer is that yes, they do, what then is the dif­fer­ence between learn­ing those skills through board games and learn­ing them through videogames? Brian’s work helps illus­trate the sim­i­lar­i­ties but even more impor­tantly, it shows how eas­ily a school library could start out with the famil­iar world of board games as a way to imple­ment gam­ing ser­vices and engage stu­dents more inter­ac­tively in learn­ing infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy skills. Thanks, Brian!