Bonus: Dustin Staats of Board Gaming With Education

0:00 this episode of brains on games is all about board games for learning welcome to brains on games i'm dr brian mcdonald in this episode i'm happy to have invited dustin stats from board gaming with education to come on the show for a chat board gaming with education is a podcast that just entered its 10th season and now it's available both in audio and video format so you can find it on youtube or on any of the podcasting apps and also the boardgamingwitheducation.com website now has a store where you can buy board games that are focused on learning let's get right into it with dustin stats from board gaming with education all right well dustin let's start by uh introducing yourself why don't you tell everybody uh who you are and what you're all about yeah um dustin satz from board game with education i'm excited to be here thank you for having me on your show brian um i am originally from nebraska i'm a proud nebraska boy but i haven't really lived there for the past i mean after graduating college i spent more of my time in asia than i have in the states this upcoming year will probably be tied for both now i'll be both in the states and in asia equal time but i taught english language in korea mainland china taiwan i'm in the states i've worked in other after-school programs as well as other schools here in the u.s

1:30 doing things outside of the classroom but in asia i was in the classroom teaching university students middle school students and elementary school students and a little bit of high school too i've really worked with all range from all the way three years old for summer to adults for as far as teaching language or supporting learning tell us about your podcast you've had a milestone that occurred recently yeah yeah we um we finished season nine which season nine ended on episode 107 i think so we did just cross 100 episodes yeah we were originally a podcast board game with english so we were all about using games for english language learning but we found that we had a lot of educators outside of that content area listening to the show and we wanted to show how games can support learning all around and now we are more than a podcast we're also a board game store very new store so uh we're carrying the games we talk about and providing resources to supplement learning with those games when you're looking at a game is there a different game that you would choose for education versus just playing for fun like what is the difference between you know gaming that's just for enjoyment versus gaming in the classroom right that's that's a good question i think uh whenever i play a game my education brain turns on immediately

3:00 i'm always thinking about how can i use this for learning and then if it's not possible or i think it's a stretch then my hobby board game brain turns on and i start kind of playing the game for fun i'm looking at a game behind you scythe i mean scythe is a game that i played with my buddies in taiwan once a week i don't think i would ever really bring that into the classroom for learning unless we were talking about game development and creating stories with the game and showing how it takes things from other worlds and combines a new kind of world with scythe and things like that but i don't really see it as a like a learning game maybe maybe i do like to say this that any game any board game that uses some language component can be used for language learning it's a stretch but if you get some people around the table like maybe i'm learning spanish for example and i'm playing scythe and everybody else is using spanish just to play the game then of course that's going to help my language skills in developing spanish but that's not really the intent of the game right the way you're learning is being surrounded by people who are speaking the language that is true i i think if i were going to bring scythe into a learning setting it would be let me think like writing short stories set in that in that setting because the setting is interesting and there's a bit of a history and a backstory to it uh but the the impact of popularity and battles

4:31 uh and how that affects your your final point total at the end is something that you know every time i play with teenagers they're shocked by the impact of that final multiplier on the game itself so i found that to be a good part well you see i've got every expansion if it was something for scythe it's on my shelf um do you look at when you're thinking about a game uh whether it's to to bring home to to play with your family or your friends or to bring to the classroom are you looking for the the mechanics or is it the theme and the content like what is it that you look for when you're choosing a game um usually when i'm choosing a game that's a good question i think it's a little bit of both as far as looking at the learning outcomes or looking at a game and then figuring out if there are learning outcomes so a lot of times i might look at um an example might be werewolf and werewolf you're saying something like i think brian is a werewolf because so you can look at those grammar structures within the game and apply that to the learning outcomes that the students are studying in class whether it's that specific sentence structure and then just practice in it rinse and repeat and that's a lot of what language learning is early on is a lot of repetition of the grammar a lot of repetition of vocabulary but what the game does is it provides that intrinsic motivation where the player wants to participate in language learning because they want to

6:01 play the game and they're involved in wanting to be part of the game so i think that's what games do great is they really tap into those some some of those motivators that you know you can't get from a textbook you can't get from listening to an audio tape yeah absolutely there is a different level of motivation right with the games uh can you think of um an example of maybe students who were less engaged and and a game kind of brought them in or pulled them into the subject that you were trying to teach yes definitely um i think one example i like to share a lot is a game we're playing called two rooms and a boom um so i had a university course where i flipped my classroom and so a lot of the lesson learning was done on their own through video instruction and in an online environment and then in class we kind of worked on their essay writing that we were working on academic writing at the time and each week we would do a short like 15 20 minute game at the beginning of the class so this helps with them meeting their getting to know their peers getting to know me build those relationships in class that we wouldn't maybe normally get with developing other activities that you would do in like a normal regular classroom versus the flipped classroom um so we did two rooms in a boom and one student who is super super shy i mean i i don't like there's a decimal level that maybe she would never reach in class and play in that game she

7:32 was like taking the lead in the rooms so two rooms in a boom you're essentially trying to uh figure out who the bomb is and save the president so it's a theme that maybe isn't applied to a lot of schools but with university level students i think you can do it and um but she was super excited about playing the game and really taking charge of the lesson too or taking charge of the game and that was really cool for me to watch is because i'm seeing her use the language i'm seeing her excited about using her language i'm seeing her also do something that she doesn't normally do in class where she's taking a little lead of the uh the experience wow so much different when it's play instead of a lecture or you know a group project or something that the students are working on right what do you see i mean other than the intrinsic motivation of playing a game what do you see as the benefits for using games in the classroom i think one big thing again is relationship building games really create those moments in your class that you don't get from a textbook you don't get from watching a movie you don't get from a lot of different activities you have those thinking jane mcgonagall's book i don't remember the title but it's uh maybe i'm not going to say the title but jane mcgonagall it's one of her first books about play and she talks about fiero which is that moment that is universally shared around the world where you raise your your hands above

9:03 your head because you you scored a goal or you completed a task when those moments are created in your classroom students are going to remember those things and they're going to tie those things into the relationships they've formed with their peers they formed in your classroom which are going to also kind of snowball into their learning and be more uh they're going to be more motivated to learn too okay and you know it's it's as the teacher you're providing that experience for them so here they are they're creating relationships with their peers but uh it's necessary for you to be in the lead to take because you're explaining the game and the instructions and setting things up for them um which is i think it's so great with uh intermediate kids maybe especially where they've got an adult that they have to look to and and follow in a different way than a teacher who's lecturing right right yeah they're able to see the teacher as a different different thing than the knowledge holder right they're able to kind of form a different relationship with their teacher than maybe they normally wouldn't right it's hard for teachers to be the knowledge holder when kids have these cell phones in their pockets i think i think it's gonna it's gonna change soon maybe teachers are gonna be the coaching role soon maybe maybe do you have uh do you have favorite games for that that teach a particular skill or that that uh involve kids in some kind of practice so some of my favorite games to use in the classroom are the ones that are um more efficient for language learning because they involve students in the process it's not

10:37 so i'd like to use this example like charades and a lot of language teachers if you search english language games maybe not now because i feel like over the last three or four years they've really kind of learned that that's not the most effective game for language learning these types of games like hangman charades because with that you have one player one student up in front of the classroom acting out so they're not even using language they looked at the alert the word and they have it in their head that's it they're acting it out where the other students are just you know thinking of words that they already have thought of you know they're not learning anything new in this process so i like to play games like trap words i know you i think you talked about on your show is so everyone's involved in the learning process because what you have is you have a team that has the word and you're creating trap words and these trap words are words the other team cannot say in guessing the word so you have to think about words associated with i don't know apple some words that associated with apple are like red fruit eat so you're thinking about these words that are associated with it and then when the other team is guessing if they say a trap word they automatically lose so what you have is the team that thought about the associated words are also listening to the other team trying to guess the words and if they use a word that's not one of the ones they thought of that's a new word for them they're learning a new word associated with apple so it's really important that everyone is involved in both the game process because there's more buy-in and when there's buy and there's learning and the learning process i think those

12:08 are really important factors when choosing a game for learning and trappers is perfect for language building i love absolutely perfect yeah it's such a good game you told me about uh two two rooms and a boom gaming moment what are your favorite what what are your favorite gaming moments do you have some some recent ones that come to mind i mean right now we're in this pandemic and everything's shut down and we can't have friends over to play games you know teachers are doing distance learning so they're not in the classroom necessarily with their students do you have some favorite moments do you have recommendations for teachers whose kids aren't physically there or for for folks who who can't have their friends over to play a game right um werewolf's a good recommendation so starting there with the recommendation is um because it's great for distance learning you don't need anything to really play i think there are different themes you could use too so if you have younger students you don't want to do werewolves because the theme of that game is the world with eats the other player i mean i think that's kind of light-hearted but some teachers might want to do something different so you can just retheme it and i think that's important too is any game like the two rooms and a boom i've rethemed it to cat and mouse so it's just a cat trying to catch a mouse um so thinking about games maybe can be you can manipulate games for learning too you don't have to play it exactly as it is in the box um keeping that in mind as far as taking games and using them online too another one we have been

13:38 playing on our channel is called nerd words so it's a science based game it's a science it's pretty much a word game that uses science terminology and that we were able to use something called pear deck i think a lot of teachers are familiar with this tool during distance learning it's a interactive presentation so students can interact with the slides as you present on them um so we used paradec to create nerd words and play it through a distance learning environment i guess as far as a moment my last semester at uh in taiwan teaching at a college there and one thing i did is i gamified my entire course that's a pretty large topic but i took a game called sherlock holmes consulting detective and i used that for comprehension skills throughout the semester and as a way to gamify my course so throughout the semester they were solving this this puzzle or this i guess case that you are acting as well you're actually competing against sherlock holmes and you're trying to solve this case and you're trying to beat sherlock holmes to the case it's really hard to beat sherlock holmes but there's still at least they want to solve it um so the whole semester they're working on this case and i finally had one group finally get to the point where they solved it and you saw that fear of moment she was like yes i got it she was super excited she figured out like who the murderer was and how it happened and why they did it so that's i mean it's always cool to see

15:09 those moments in class dustin if my viewers were trying to track you down how would uh how will folks find you so boardgamingwitheducation.com is probably the best if you want to listen to the podcast or join any of our social media get involved in our community there's a tab called podcast and community on that website and you'll be able to find everything you need there all right we'll put that link up in the in the notes for the show so it'll be easy for people to track you down awesome thank you so much for having me on brian this is this was a lot of fun well thanks for coming on i really appreciate having you thanks dustin for joining me today i had the honor of joining dustin on his podcast this week actually i think the episode is coming up so you can check that out on the board gaming with education podcast or on youtube as usual if you have any questions or suggestions for me you can find me at brian brainsongames.ca brainsongames.com is the website that's where you can find previous episodes and future episodes will be posted there too brains on games is the twitter handle and the instagram feed and the facebook page so we're all over the place and if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to be notified of future ones you can head on over to youtube and click that subscribe button thanks for joining me and hopefully i'll see you next time

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