Another Class!

Another Class! is an education simulation RPG game. The players will become teachers and get to know a class of unique students before they go through quite eventful 4 years of high school together. At the end of the journey, the players will engage in quantitative and qualitative analysis to reflect on the decisions they made as teachers!

Another Class!

1. 3 players | 40 minutes | available online

With this game, the players are expected to:

• Experience the difficulty of addressing every student’s need.
• See how different factors impact students’ performance in school.
• Reveal their own implicit biases.
• Raise awareness for mental health & physical health.
• Learn US demography with statistics and probability.
• Become more sympathetic towards others.
• Explore their own philosophy of teaching & education.

Materials needed.

• On paper: 3 dice for each player & pencils & paper & calculator
• Online: this manual & online calculator (calculator.net) & online simple dice (random.org/dice) or online cool dice! (teacherled.com/iresources/tools/dice)

All the Worksheets You will Use!

• [know your students] for create NPC students
• [Class Roster] for NPC student info
• [Teacher’s Memo] 1 x 4 for recording events happened each year
• [Performance Record] for tracking student’s performance
• [Impact Rules] for determining exact impact of certain events
• [Event Sheet] (1) & (2) for random events
• [Teacher’s Reflection] for general reflection after the game ends

Game Play & Rules

Set up

1. To become a teach, you need to know your students first!
2. Use the [Know your students] worksheet to find out the basic information of your student, including: name, ethnicity, preferred pronouns, family members, household income, mental health & physical health status, and initial school performance score
3. All the information will be randomly generated by rolling dices, the [Know your students] worksheet will tell you how many dices you need to roll and how to make sense of the numbers you get from rolling.
4. Record the basic information in the [Class Roster] worksheet, when you have information about all 4 students you are ready to go!

Walk Through

1. Now, as you have some basic understanding of your students, you will start accompanying their journey in high school. Since your high school has 4 years, there will be 4 rounds of the game.
2. In each year of school (each round), things will happen in following order: teacher event, student event, additional event, teacher action.
3. For teacher event, you will roll 1 dice to choose an [Event sheet], 1-3 means event sheet (1), 4-6 means event sheet (2), then you will roll 1 dice to see what happens.
4. Teachers have 4 action points as default, teacher event may give you more or less action points. Write down what happened to you and how many action points you have on [Teacher’s Memo]
5. After that, every student will have 1 student event, roll 1 dice to choose an [Event sheet], and roll 2 dices to see what happens to each student. Refer to the [Impact Rule] for how many scores they lose or gain, write down what happened to each student and the impact (scores change) in [Teacher’s Memo]
6. Next, we have additional event, roll 1 dice to see which student has an additional event, 5 means student 1 and 2 both have additional event, 6 means student 3 and 4 both have additional event, find out the event, determine the impact and take a memo in the same way as step 5.
7. This is the time for teacher action, you need to decide how to use your action points for your students, each action point means +1 to the student’s score, you can use multiple points for one student. When you use an action point for a student, you have to explain what action you will take to help that student. Write down your decision and actions in [Teacher’s Memo]
8. After you take your action, one school year (one round) is finished, you will need to put their scores (after events and your actions) into [Performance Record]. Then, you can proceed to the next school year (next round).

Look Back

1. When you finished all 4 years of high school (4 rounds), you may go ahead and fill out the rest of [Performance Record]
2. At last is [Teacher’s Reflection], you will see some guiding questions and you are free to write your own thoughts as well.

Basic Principles!

• Narrative: this game requires players to engage in this imaginative school life by contributing their narrative; players need to write down the exact events and explain what actions they will take. Players will be the ones who tell the story; hence it is important to focus on events in life, not changes to scores. Remember the moments in our life, not the numbers!
• Noncompetitive: this game does not put one player against another, or put one NPC student against another, therefore the theme is not to win. When 2 or 3 students play this game together, they will have their own classes and events, but they can share what happens in their classes along the way and discuss what actions they can take to help the students. Be a good coworker!
• Reflective: this game is designed with the intention to help players reflect on their education philosophy and issues in the education system. Data analysis and reflective questions on the worksheet are just meant to guide players to think about different issues. There is no right answer to any questions! Just feel free to share your thoughts!

Note for Instructors

This game is designed for a specific scenario, but it does not mean only students in high school or beyond can play this game. It is very important to highlight the issues in education and develop awareness in earlier stages of students’ education as well. In general, the recommended audience of this game is for students in middle school or beyond. However, please feel free to determine if this game might be appropriate for students in your class. Please be advised that certain events in this game might resonate with student’s own experience and therefore evoke emotional reaction. As instructors, please also remember it is important to attend to your students’ feelings. Encourage your students to be sympathetic and bring positive influence on others, while making sure you are doing so yourself!

The game itself takes approximately 40 minutes to play, if you wish to shorten the time needed in class, you may ask your students to finish the set-up stage before class. So, the class time can be better utilized for discussion and reflection. If you wish you may require students to submit any worksheet used for this game, as it will let your better understand a student’s thinking. I believe it can also be beneficial to ask student to share their reflections in class. Anyone who wishes to use this game in an educational setting is free to modify it as they please, but it is always important to keep the basic three principles in mind.

This game is an individual project created with limited resources and time. If you have any advice on how to improve this game or have anything you may want to share. I can be reached at szhang03@wesleyan.edu All kinds of insights are welcomed and appreciated. I hope this game may help you in some way and wish you good luck with everything!