Link leads to an article about an Orlando teacher using D&D for an after school group of kids. It's very positive and very supportive of this activity.
Did any of you guys have a group like this? I played through the 'Satanic Panic" so it was frowned upon while I was in school.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/os-game-changer-learning-program-orlando-20141231-story.html
Ps- Using a word search to determine how potent a protective spell is was genius!
Quote from: Patrick;808305Link leads to an article about an Orlando teacher using D&D for an after school group of kids. It's very positive and very supportive of this activity.
Did any of you guys have a group like this? I played through the 'Satanic Panic" so it was frowned upon while I was in school.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/os-game-changer-learning-program-orlando-20141231-story.html
Ps- Using a word search to determine how potent a protective spell is was genius!
I think the article is premium content or something, have to sign up for it?
"Satanic Panic" lol, same here, it was in it's prime when I was a school kid. My parents were charismatic Christians, and our church was really into that stupid hysteria. We ended up playing "Traveller" and "The Fantasy Trip" instead of D&D just so our parents wouldn't see the dreaded D&D name on anything and freak the hell out.
So, no RPG groups like that for me. A history teacher in Junior High did have an after school war gaming club for a while which was pretty neat.
As a teacher, I've run RPG's at my school for 5 years now. We had a club for a bit, but it got unwieldy, due to massive eccentricity expanded exponentially as the club numbers rose.:-)
I'm a Speech Pathologist at a junior high and we have an "Enrichment" period twice a week. I run a gaming group for ~15 kids. We basically play OD&D, though I don't tell them that. A student and I split the group into two and DM simultaneously (it gets LOUD). Every couple months the enrichment rotations switch but most kids sign up again for "RPG Time", so it's like an open campaign with a lot of the same characters. Lots of character death, though.
It's been a lot of fun and the kids have a blast. My administration is really supportive, so that helps a lot.
We didn't have a teacher-run RPG club when I was in school, but we did have an RPG 'society' during 6th Form (age 16-18 further education). Our college had time on Wednesday afternoons for clubs and societies so we got to play during the school day every week.
Being 'keen students' we also played pretty much every lunch time, too!
My maths teacher did actually join our gaming group in the end, but as a player rather than any kind of 'group leader'. He was newly qualified, so only about 6 years older than us, and had been a keen Diplomacy player in the past. For some reason he asked me if I played Diplomacy (which I did) and we invited him round for a game and from that he became interested in RPGs too, which was our main hobby as a group.
This sort of group wasn't my initial on-ramp to rpg's, but it was a major accelerator and got me more into mainstream games that lots of people played. This was 1980, and my after school group was basically responsible for me moving from weird fringy games like melee and En Garde! into 1E AD&D and Traveller. It was also where I met my most longstanding and best friend to this day, so I owe that group a shout out!
No group like that in my school. I don't think any of my teachers even knew what D&D was.
I do vaguely recall a copy of an Avalon Hill game being on the shelves of one of my classrooms. It may have been Tactics. I don't remember which grade that was or even if it belonged to the teacher, it may have been left behind by another teacher.
Students can be ahead of the teachers. I remember first using a branch of the Internet back in college around 1987, green text on a black screen. The college was networked with other state colleges and businesses and used a BB system. I remember telling my teachers and counselors about the Internet back in the late 80's and early 90's and most had no idea what I was talking about.
Quote from: Logosi;808316I think the article is premium content or something, have to sign up for it?
Crap, sorry, I linked from Facebook and it wasn't a premium from there.
Another article about it that should work for you:
http://www.theorlandoan.com/2013/05/reading-writing-and-dungeons-dragons.html
I founded the schools first PRG club when I was 12 and got some teach to sponser us so we could use a class room. I got into some trouble when my first set of membership cards had a black priest sacrificing a naked woman on an altar. Not for Satanic Panic but becuase the woman was naked I produced a revised version and all was well.
I thought about starting a club when I was teaching but my first job was in a London comp and really at the end of the day I just wanted to escape (my Wednesday afternoon elective program on Folklore with 35 low ability 14 year olds was more than enough...), then I was teaching in a Girls' Grammar school so an RPG club would just have been an excuse for hormonal teenage girls to hang round and generate DRAMA. It was bad enough when I used the Gym or talk 6th Form Tennis, RPGS woudl just have been looking for trouble.
A mate of mine in Spain uses it to teach English to kids as young as 5 and he also used it while he was tefl in Taiwan.
I run a weekly group of four students who are on the spectrum at my high school . There are actually six players, but currently two are on the wrestling team : ). It has been an priceless experience for both them and myself. This current group is a test run to developing a more developed program to promote social skills. I'm currently writing a structured system/methodology to running the group (linking progression with targeted IEP skills) and will be implementing pre/post test assessment to measure skill acquisition (using the Social Skill Improvement System as a metric). But regardless of the outcome, the connections I have made with my students has been invaluable.
And it may surprise some that I am currently using 5E. It is not my preferred system, but is the one the gels with my students the most.
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My junior high had an AD&D club run (and DMed) by a teacher who taught English and critical thinking. I have a lot of fond memories of that group. The Satanic Panic shut it down not long after I moved on to high school, sadly.
I was the faculty adviser for the local junior high school D&D club in 1979, before the nonsense got underway.
Quote from: Tyndale;808347I'm currently writing a structured system/methodology to running the group (linking progression with targeted IEP skills) and will be implementing pre/post test assessment to measure skill acquisition (using the Social Skill Improvement System as a metric).
That sounds very interesting. I'm sure lots of people would be interested in anonymised results if they were available. I'm certain that playing RPGs increased my own interpersonal skills significantly as I was growing up, and it would be invaluable to build up some stats in that area.
'Role play' is already a widely used training method in industry.
Quote from: Patrick;808335Crap, sorry, I linked from Facebook and it wasn't a premium from there.
Another article about it that should work for you:
http://www.theorlandoan.com/2013/05/reading-writing-and-dungeons-dragons.html
Cool thanks, that link worked, the bit about the players chasing the big baddy out the window was funny. :)
In my own experience I'm sure reading and learning game rules was good for me as a brain exercise. I like the article, interesting thread.
Not in the context of school, but I have been running RPG workshops for children in a "social hot spot" neighbourhood during the summer holidays. Due to issues with getting a suitable room on location (and some minor financial backing), the focus of these games were strictly historical so far.
Not quite school RPG. But one of my teachers was doing after school computer programming classes (BASIC!) and one of the games he showed me and later gave me to play at the library was the old D&D rogue game. Still have the maps somewhere.
One of our librarians though was heavy into gaming and was a chess grand master to boot. Pretty sure he had about every SPI and TFG wargame ever made. As well as Battletech. He DMed AD&D at the library and later I took over as DM when he moved away. Unfortunately ye ole satanic panic set in late and the librarians started setting up increasing excuses to disallow us playing there.
Quote from: Tyndale;808347I run a weekly group of four students who are on the spectrum at my high school...
This is of great interest to me! I'm doing something similar, but focusing on auditory comprehension. Specifically, I'm looking to see if regular play of an RPG will help the students form the fabled "gestalt images" that aid in the quick processing and comprehension of auditory verbal information.
In the course of my time running the games, though, I have seen quite a bit of incidental growth in social skills among the students with spectrum-y social issues.
I'd be very interested to hear more about what you're doing.
Quote from: Patrick;808305Did any of you guys have a group like this? I played through the 'Satanic Panic" so it was frowned upon while I was in school.
Never heard of RPGs before I graduated high school in '77; I started playing in college the next fall. Middle schools and high schools around here don't seem to have any problem with after-school groups but I don't know how involved teachers are or whether any of them have the sort of goals of the group in that story. (I managed to read the originally linked story via Google cache.)
Quote from: Doughdee222;808330I do vaguely recall a copy of an Avalon Hill game being on the shelves of one of my classrooms. It may have been Tactics. I don't remember which grade that was or even if it belonged to the teacher, it may have been left behind by another teacher.
A likely Avalon Hill game in a school would be Outdoor Survival, both for its popularity and its subject matter.
At my Junior High, during the peak of the 'satanic panic', playing RPGs was banned in school. We did it anyways, secretly, during lunch hours.
At high school, we played all through it without a problem, but we had no club. We used the back of the drama room, which was the hangout for all the drama students, so it made for some interesting players sometimes.