How Board Games Are Used in the Classroom
Eight educators discuss how they use board games as part of their lessons
Main image: Votes for Women, courtesy of Fort Circle Games
I learned quite a bit from a tiny robot named 2-XL.
If you’re not an official Old™ like me, you may not remember this kids’ toy, which first appeared in 1978, and was a glorified 8-track cassette player with an interactive component. There were over 40 tapes available for the original model, and they’d play recordings that offered educational content and trivia, often stopping to allow the listener to press a button to answer A, B, or C (or true/false). A couple of the tapes even came with—you knew this was coming at some point—a board game. For roughly 7-year-old Keith, it meant that learning could be fun. (Okay, 7-year-old Keith already thought learning was fun, because he was, and remains, a super-big nerd who likes learning, but just go with it.)
It’s been a few decades since then, unfortunately, and now my daughters have all used games somewhere outside of the classroom for learning, often with the direct sanction of their teachers, with apps like ExtraMath, Rocket Math, and Duolingo all gamifying some aspect of learning. Duolingo claims 46 million active users; I used it to learn enough Welsh to communicate with some of my wife’s cousins when we visited there a few years ago. Using games to learn or review or reinforce information on your own time has become so accepted for this generation that explaining to them that (grumpy old man voice) back in my day parents and teachers thought games were just a waste of time is like explaining to them how rotary phones worked.
Acceptance of games within the classroom doesn’t seem to be the same, even with a small body of research showing the value of games in educational settings. There are plenty of teachers and professors trying to work board games into their classrooms, combining their love of games with a desire to increase students’ interest and engagement while also teaching them hard and soft skills. I spoke to eight educators, ranging from elementary school teachers to college professors, about how and why they use tabletop games in their classes and what makes those games good choices for their goals.
Why use tabletop games in the classroom?
“Who says that learning and fun have to be mutually exclusive?” asks Steve O’Rourke, Assistant Professor of Psychology at SUNY Westchester Community College. Indeed, the idea of making learning fun was a constant theme in these conversations, both because as teachers they want their students to want to learn, and because the dopamine rewards we get from games can increase both reinforcement learning (we learn from the consequences we see from our actions) and declarative memory learning (retrieval of facts, concepts, or ideas)*.
“School should be fun. If students get to go to school and do things like this, they meet new people, form connections with other people they might not otherwise get to form connections with,” says Jared Fishman, a history teacher at Brunswick School in Greenwich, Connecticut and the co-founder of 20-Sided Gamified LLC.
Tabletop games, including traditional board games and many role-playing games, create situations where students have to interact with each other and with the material in novel ways, fostering development of interpersonal skills as well as retention of facts. “I mostly use games to train social-emotional skills, as well as executive functions,” says Bart de Jong, a primary school teacher and designer of the games Bable and L’oaf. “Social-emotional skills include things like working together, loss acceptance, assertiveness, and patience. Executive functions are things like logical reasoning, planning ahead, and risk assessment.”
Matt Jackson, a history teacher at the Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Delaware, offered a similar view, saying that “Using board and card games is a soft way of getting students to engage with one another in a competitive or a collaborative way.”
The majority of the comments I received from educators were about fostering these softer skills, such as communication, collaboration, and negotiation, along with related skills like learning to see and understand someone else’s point of view. There’s a benefit to students from feeling like they’ve accomplished something when they win a game or finish a scenario, with or without a tangible reward from it, and several educators pointed to the bonds that form from these shared experiences. Scott Clothier, a history teacher at Wilmington Friends School (also in Delaware), uses Diplomacy in his classes, in part because “every time you move a piece, it impacts everyone else. Everything is interconnected.”
“I’m a cognitive neuroscientist, I look at decision-making and the brain,” says Ben Dyson, an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. “As a tabletop player I’ve noticed that some games are extremely elegant in terms of things you’d teach in a cognitive psychology class,” citing risk assessment as one such area where games can illustrate concepts more effectively than a textbook might.
What makes a game work in the classroom
Time is the enemy of using games in the classroom, so teachers who want to introduce tabletop games have to either focus on games that are short enough to play during class periods or modify existing games to make them fit.
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