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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at last, more people to play scrabble !!
Comment by Dennis Blackmore — Tuesday, April 22, 2008 @ 3:07 pm
All I have to say is Chess Chess Chess!
Comment by El CheapO — Wednesday, April 23, 2008 @ 2:40 pm
Carcassonne! Settlers of Cataan! Puerto Rico! Oasis! Gulo Gulo! Ice Towers! Magic! Pokemon! D&D! Monster Island.
Comment by Liz — Thursday, April 24, 2008 @ 9:01 am
Oh and King of the Beasts is particularly good for kids who can’t read yet. It has interesting strategy.
Comment by Liz — Thursday, April 24, 2008 @ 9:06 am
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 — Friday, April 25, 2008 @ 5:30 am
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