A Taxonomy of Classroom Play

Discussing the use of games in a classroom setting usually conjures up pretty similar – often quite negative – ideas or memories. As Liz Davidson put it in a recent podcast on adapting games for the classroom, “kids can smell an ‘educational game’ a mile off”. To understand why educational games get such a bad rap, and to sketch out potential spaces for games that students actually find compelling, it’s useful to outline a taxonomy for games in the classroom based on how they connect gameplay with learning.

In suggesting any taxonomy, however tentative, it’s important to acknowledge the necessarily doomed nature of the endeavour. As with any classification system, I’m certain it will be possible to find games that conflate or transgress any proposed boundaries or divisions I might draw. Regardless, I feel it’s a productive exercise – perhaps even the discussion around those conflations and transgressions would be a fruitful enough outcome to make it worthwhile.

Even defining the scope is problematic. I have called them ‘classroom games’. You could of course be playing them outside of the classroom, even beyond the school itself. An alternative would have been ‘educational games’ but that feels too broad as I want to limit thinking to the kind of experiences a teacher with a class of students might employ. For this model, that’s the sweet spot, the typical context. Can these games be stretched to other spaces? Absolutely.

In short, I think it’s helpful to consider five ways that a game can exist within a typical classroom. It can provide gamified rewards, it can motivate specific mechanics, it can facilitate social interaction, it can explore concepts, and it can immerse students in thematic narratives. While I will work through each of these individually, any given game may sit in more than one category.

Gamified Rewards

The first category is not really an educational game in itself, but a way of making a game out of the whole learning experience. The insight here is that people play games when they don’t have to. Games are inherently motivating. So – the logic goes – if we could make ‘doing school’ a game, it would be motivating too. This would solve the perennial challenge of disengaged, disinterested, or ‘misbehaving’ students.

Unfortunately a lot of work in this space misses the point that games are often intrinsically motivating because they are fun to play. If we are not careful we can hollow out the actual ‘play’ aspect of the experience, and end up relying on competition or reward as extrinsic motivators for the behaviour we want to see in students. The use of extrinsic motivation is of particular concern given the amount of research questioning its long-term impact.

Popular online system ClassDojo is an example of this, enabling teachers to ‘gamify’ various desired classroom behaviours. Students are rewarded with Dojo Points which are tracked on a class leaderboard. There are lots of offline variants of this type of approach, but what they share is the trappings of being a game, without any actual meaningful play. Arguably a more successful example was ChoreWars, which mimicked superficial aspects of D&D to incentivise children to do chores around the house.

Motivated Mechanics

The second category is similar to Gamified Rewards in that it relies on the game-like appearance of the activity to engage and motivate. The difference is that there is actually a game involved – specifically a game in which the mechanical actions of play are aligned with learning objectives. By playing the game, you are doing the work that you would otherwise be doing in the lesson.

This is probably the most popular way of using games in the classroom, and was the focus of Liz Davidson’s excellent discussion with Andrew Olimpi. It is not surprising that Liz and Andrew are Latin teachers, as languages are one of the areas where Motivated Mechanics approach is most applicable. When learning a language, repetition of vocabulary is a key task – students practicing the interpretation and construction of spoken and written texts in the language they’re learning. These repetitive actions can be boring as a rote learning task, but make for excellent gaming mechanics. Andrew describes adapting games like Codenames and Cluedo to create motivated opportunities for students to practice listening to, speaking, reading and writing Latin.

Another area that is well matched to this approach is mathematics – and most maths teachers will tell you that games are a mainstay of their classroom, particularly in earlier years. Many of these games use very simple mechanics though Numbers League is a more structured example.

Whatever subject area they are in, these games seek to build skills or knowledge through repetition and rehearsal. That repetitive activity becomes the core mechanic, adding two numbers, naming a state capital, reciting a line of a poem and so on. The biggest watch-out is that enough of the play is maintained to keep the game fun. As Liz put it, “nobody wants to do a roll and move and conjugate a verb”.

Social interaction

While languages, mathematics and fact-heavy hard sciences are the domains best known for Motivated Mechanics games, drama classrooms and personal development lessons are where we typically find Social Interaction games. The personal interaction inherent in many games makes them an ideal way to engage with interpersonal interaction itself.

Perhaps the most common example of this is the use of games as ‘ice breakers’ within a classroom. In providing a context and content for social interaction, they remove much of the initial discomfort of communicating with strangers. By the end of a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament or a Scavenger Hunt, it’s much easier for students to interact with one another as part of their class activity. Beyond this, many games work to explicitly foster social connections, from simple name memory games to Human Bingo and Two Truths and a Lie.

Within drama and personal development classes, there is often a deeper purpose to social interaction games, where the social performance involved is the skill being learned. Drama teachers might ‘gamify’ the portrayal of emotions for example, while a Positive Psychology personal development class might create a game around expressions of gratitude.

Concepts and Systems

Some classroom games focus on the simulation of a particular concept or system that is relevant to the field of study. In playing the game, students have the opportunity to encounter, observe, experience, and manipulate the system. Often this will give them a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the system than had they simply read about it or heard it described.

In StarPower, students experience a simple simulation of social and political stratification. Initially divided arbitrarily into three groups, they then play through several rounds of trading that increase wealth and power disparity between groups, based on initial allocation of resources. By the final round of the game the group with the most resources is able to change the rules of the game – inevitably to their benefit. In the space of an hour or two students develop a very different appreciation of social power imbalances than through a text book.

In a similar fashion, RaFa RaFa is an exploration of cultural diversity and inclusion. Students are split into two different ‘cultural groups’ with very different behavioural norms, and experience the challenges of being a ‘traveller’ from one culture into another.

Immersive thematic narratives

In many ways, this final category is a way of extending, integrating, deepening and making more complex, games that might exist in the other categories. Games in this category invite students to participate in ongoing narratives, immersing themselves in an imagined world through play. This world may be a simulation of the real one, as in the Model United Nations, or The World Peace Game where students take the roles of political leaders in order to resolve global geo-political issues. Richard Gerver experimented with similar ideas on a smaller scale, developing a micro-community modelled on an adult ‘town’ in the Grangeton project described in his excellent book, Creating Tomorrow’s Schools Today. 

Students are also immersed in a thematic narrative in Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert technique. The teacher creates a fictional context in which students take on roles within a team of experts. They are given a team assignment that generates tasks and activities which involve exploring content and skills from the curriculum.

My interest in this type of game within the classroom has led to the creation of Terra Fabula and Ararat. While they require extensive upfront investment of time and effort, I have found that these types of play experiences are powerfully engaging for students, and provide innumerable opportunities for learning in many of the ways described above. While ‘playing’ in that fictional space, students can still encounter relevant domain-specific knowledge, and practice domain-specific skills – indeed the fictional context can provide powerful motivation to do so.

Thematic games also produce rich conversations between students and with teachers, as issues emerging from the game are discussed. Teachers observe that these discussions are often far deeper, more insightful and more nuanced than typical conversations, given the personal, embedded perspective students are bringing to the table.

With so many different ways of using games and play in the classroom, the important question is always what we are wanting to achieve as educators. As long as our decisions about when and how to engage students with games are aligned with these learning goals, they can be an incredibly powerful tool.