Ideas Worth Stealing (A Manifesto of Sorts)

I have always been intrigued at the potential for games and play in the classroom. Having endured my share of ‘educational games’ during my schooling, yet passionately enjoyed recreational games outside of school, it always felt like there was a opportunity being missed here somewhere.

Over recent years I’ve become increasingly aware of the renaissance that has occurred within tabletop gaming. Credit where it is due, long-running game review channel Shut Up and Sit Down played a large role in opening my eyes to the diversity, innovation and creativity in contemporary board games. More recently, Quinns ongoing quest to do the same for table top roleplaying games, and Samantha Leigh’s passionate promotion of the indie game scene continue to blow my mind.

Being exposed to all these new games led to the realisation that while the recreational tabletop scene is moving ahead in creative, innovative leaps and bounds, the same is much less true of educational games. Most of the games teachers use in the classroom still draw on the ideas, mechanics and structures of recreational games from at least fifty years ago.

What if that wasn’t the case, I found myself asking. What if all taht creativity and innovation found its way from recreational games to educational games? As someone with one foot in education and one foot in tabletop gaming, it felt like this was an opportunity too fascinating to ignore.

And so Schoolhouse Games was born, with a simple ambition: to steal the great ideas that are appearing in the rich, dynamic world of tabletop gaming, and use them to create engaging, compelling games for the classroom.

My goal with Schoolhouse Games is not about merely ‘adapting’ games for the classroom. This is something that progressive and innovative teachers already do, taking existing games and retool them for specific subjects. Cole Wehrle has written about doing this for History lessons. Liz Davidson and Andrew Olimpi have discussed adapting games for Latin classes.

My goal is to work with teachers to understand where more immersive, interactive and experiential ways of engaging students could be valuable – and to create bespoke games to match those opportunities. While these games will be responses to specific contexts of need, with the universality of education I hope they’ll also resonate with a broader audience of teachers who see their relevant in their own classrooms.

So far, this approach has produced three games that have been piloted at various Australian schools:

• Terra Fabula, a map-making game in which Year 5 students explore the impact of colonial first contact through the eyes of an Indigenous community;
• Ararat, a roleplaying game of sorts, where students take on the characters of miners in the Victorian gold fields of the 1850s; and
• Triptych, a literacy unit that uses one-page solo journaling games to help students write narrative, informative and persuasive texts – before inviting them to create their own one-page game.

If you are an educator, a game designer, or just someone interested in how play can find a meaningful role in schools, I look forward to exploring this exciting space together.

You can contact me at on BlueSky or by email.

All the published material from my games is on itch.io