April 22, 2008

How School Libraries Can Use Board Games

Back in Feb­ru­ary, I was excited that Brian Mayer had tied the New York state cur­ricu­lum stan­dards to board games and that the School Library Sys­tem of Gene­see Val­ley BOCES had invested in a board game col­lec­tion for use by its mem­ber libraries. Since then, how­ever, Brian, Chris Har­ris, and their col­leagues have stepped it up a notch and made the link between gam­ing and edu­ca­tion more applic­a­ble beyond New York by align­ing the use of these games with the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of School Librar­i­ans’ Stan­dards for the 21st-Century Learner.

AASL Stan­dards for the 21st-Century Learner

“The new AASL stan­dards are very sup­port­ive of the ideas and skills that make up gam­ing as can be seen in the gam­ing align­ment below. This, doc­u­ment, cre­ated by the mem­ber libraries of the School Library Sys­tem of Gene­see Val­ley BOCES pro­vides sup­port for the use of games as a learn­ing resource in school libraries.”

The 3MB PDF is avail­able here.

If you’re inter­ested in this sub­ject, you’ll def­i­nitely want to fol­low their new Gam­ing blog, which includes a sep­a­rate post explain­ing that gam­ing also strongly cor­re­sponds to many of the Com­mon Beliefs laid out by the AASL. Major thanks to the BOCES crew for doing this work and lead­ing the way in this area.

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6:24 am Comments (7)

7 Comments »

  1. at last, more peo­ple to play scrabble !!

    Comment by Dennis Blackmore — April 22, 2008 @ 3:07 pm

  2. All I have to say is Chess Chess Chess!

    Comment by El CheapO — April 23, 2008 @ 2:40 pm

  3. Car­cas­sonne! Set­tlers of Cataan! Puerto Rico! Oasis! Gulo Gulo! Ice Tow­ers! Magic! Poke­mon! D&D! Mon­ster Island.

    Comment by Liz — April 24, 2008 @ 9:01 am

  4. Oh and King of the Beasts is par­tic­u­larly good for kids who can’t read yet. It has inter­est­ing strategy.

    Comment by Liz — April 24, 2008 @ 9:06 am

  5. Thanks for the game sug­ges­tions, every­one. We have quite a few of them already, full list at our gam­ing site, but will cer­tainly check out King of the Beasts and some of the others.

    Being a school set­ting, we have been most care­fully avoid­ing D&D for now. We didn’t want any­thing to derail the gam­ing project before it got started and D&D does bring a bit of bag­gage with it to the table. Call us chicken if you must, but I made the deci­sion to focus on suc­cess. CCGs are out (for now) for the same rea­son. Schools have had many issues with them. What we did do, though, is bet games that are sim­i­lar. For exam­ple, Skally­waggs pro­vides a nice CCG-like card set with com­plex rules but no col­lect­ing. Shad­ows over Camelot pro­vides some of the epic quest ele­ments of D&D in a more ELA-aligned setting.

    It has been very inter­est­ing work­ing with our local gam­ing store. They have had to start tak­ing a much closer look at games to real­ize that what they think is an awe­some game won’t work for us because it is all about brew­ing beer.

    Thanks for the sup­port, and please keep send­ing us sug­ges­tions if you have more ideas for K-12 games that can be tied to a cur­ricu­lum standard!

    Comment by Christopher Harris — April 25, 2008 @ 5:30 am

  6. […] The Shifted Librarian […]

    Pingback by Media-gam-arama | CCMS Book Bag Blog — April 30, 2008 @ 8:06 pm

  7. I still pre­fer scrabble.

    Comment by Norm — December 19, 2008 @ 9:51 am

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