User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 Teaching in TTRPGs panel

MARYSSA MARI: Hello, welcome to the Teaching in TTRPG's panel. I am our moderator today. I am Maryssa. I'm Paizo's web content manager. I use she/her pronouns. And today I am joined by both staff, freelancers and guests. So I will just throw it around.

What I'm looking at is my Zoom call and not the actual screen. So I might introduce people out of order. So to my left is my coworker, Mike Kimmel. Do you want to introduce yourself?

MIKE KIMMEL: Hello, yes, I'm Mike Kimmel. My pronouns are he/him. I am currently a developer on the Starfinder team at Paizo and I'm a former teacher. My teaching career started in 2013. I previously have taught social studies at an alternative high school and then was a literacy specialist, kind of training teachers around best practices in literacy instruction at the district level. Then I came to work for Paizo on the Pathfinder Society team. I went back to teaching and taught English intervention classes at high school again for a year. And this past fall recently came back to Paizo. So that's me.

>> All right. I am gonna also now throw it to David. Thank you.

>> Sure, just a quick question. I see five participants. Is this being broadcasted in a different way where I don't see those who are-

>> Oh, so the first person you see is our producer, Adam. He's been running the Twitch stream, Sneaky, in the background for all of us. He has actually been here for every single live panel we had and now the audience knows that too.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: Okay, so I see what's happening. All right, well, I'm Dr. David Niecikowski. I've been teaching for 28 years. I've taught in Tucson, now I'm in Vegas. I've taught elementary and secondary. I'm elementary and secondary certified. My PhD is in language reading and culture, but I was also a secondary social studies teacher as well. Currently, I teach at the detention center here in Vegas to youth who are incarcerated.

But in terms of my background in the industry, I've been in the industry since 1999. For instance, in terms of role-playing games, I did something for Pinnacle here called Weird Wars. The Eastern Front, that was D&D 3.0. I've done something for Fantasy Flight for the Blue Planet line. And another game system here. This was a different game system.

But in terms of educational sources, my book, my 2011 book on game design in the classroom, that goes over how to use games for small group instruction and to do projects in game design. My background is in gifted education. I was an administrator of gifted education in Tucson. And here at Touro University, I teach three of the six classes for teachers to get their gifted endorsement. My dissertation is on how to write rule books. So it's on document design. So you can download the performance list here for free at my website, just look up my name-dot-com, http://davidniecikowski.com.

And so the performance list is free. But my dissertation and the resource guides here, which you'd have to print out as PDFs are different. So I presented this set of gamma at Gen Con. I ran a trade at Gen Con for about five years in the past. So that's just a little bit about my background.

>> And we'll definitely be coming back to some of the stuff that you've written and that dissertation. All right, last and certainly not least is another familiar face who's been seen around Paizo in the organized classroom. And I'm also barely scraping the surface, is Ivis.

IVIS K. FLANAGAN Hi, I'm Ivis, I use she/they pronouns. I am currently a first and second gifted interventionist. I have taught literally everything K to 12 since 2011. I've been doing gifted for the last seven years. And before that I taught elementary. Outside of that, like Marissa said, I freelance for multiple years. But a lot for Paizo, I am way too involved in OrcaPlay. I'm actually one of the RBCs for OrcaPlay currently. So all around very hands-on with as much as we can get with table top RPGs. I've done presentations at trade day for Gen Con with specifically utilizing a unit that fully teaches research-driven creative writing. Also, David, I've used your book in my classroom.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: That's good. I'm glad that you did.

>> So there you go.

>> That was not on purpose. I did not know that they have used each other's resources. So that is a lovely coincidence. All right, and we will get back and forth. I definitely think we're gonna start questioning you about your book later in the panel if we have time then, David, that's fantastic.

All right, I'm gonna start this out with some like really beginner, simple questions. And then if they get into some deeper questions, they're gonna be able to ask questions. And then if they get into some deeper questions or they lead to longer conversations, this is absolutely a conversation between all of us and all of y'all. I am mostly just here to keep things moving along. So let's start this really simple is like this is where I have gaming and education experiences. I ran my high school's tabletop gaming club my senior year of high school. I participated in it since I was a freshman at high school. That's how I got introduced to tabletop gaming with the game that shall not be named 3.0. That was how I was introduced.

And then, so does any of your school or education programs have any gaming clubs and like, did you participate in them? What was your experience with them? Or should I just like call somebody out if nobody's gonna come up?

>> You should call on people like a classroom.

>> Like a classroom, so I asked for some hands up 'cause this is a classroom setting. I did see I'm dispersed.

>> Yeah, I'll jump in. The school that I'm at right now, we do after school clubs every semester basically. And we've had board game clubs, but I will be honest and this is probably a good thing to bring up into this is that there is pushback on tabletop RPGs. And so bringing that in, I have tried every term for the last two years and repeatedly been told, are you certain this is age appropriate? So we definitely still have a stigma that we're fighting back against with how we're bringing this into the classroom and bringing this into the schools. But there's definitely ways to argue that and push for it. But it takes time to break beyond the mindset of, literally I've had someone at school say to me, aren't you doing satanic rituals when you do that?

So we still have that mindset in existence that we have to push back against. But yes, we do have board gaming clubs and really the kids who are doing them are very engaged.

>> Awesome, David, I also saw your hand up and I will try to not teach this to class for me.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: Well, in terms of board and card games, I did a Gifted and Talented units all around. In fact, I taught every class with a game. So if we had a theme like migration, I would play games that involve migration such as Pompeii, the Mayfair game where you're selling Pompeii and the volcano erupts and then you migrate out. So I would incorporate that into our theme. I think that year was causality, cause and effect. So in terms of using board and card games, that's where I'm most comfortable at. In terms of role-playing games, this is correct. As a former administrator, I would probably not approve it unless it was the people you're having conflict with were non-living. I would not be comfortable doing a role-playing game where students would be wiping out living people, okay?

So if there's a way to, and also if you base it on literature, such as, let's say, Journey to the Center of the Earth, if you were doing classics like that where you could, or Oz, there's ways to incorporate it with the curriculum, with literature, and also have the opponents be non-living things, whether they be robots or whatever you wanna do. I think you can get more of a, parents would sign off on that and you can tie it into the curriculum and tie it into the standards.

So Ivis is correct. As a former administrator, I would push back on it unless you had some things like that.

>> Like a really clear delineation of the good versus evil breakdown, which is actually how I was able to get my parents to let me read and play a lot of fantasy games, is they would also look at, pre-approve the stuff that I would play and read, and they're like, "Oh, okay, this is a really obvious good versus evil breakdown. Here you go." What I was supposed to get, yeah.

>> I can see, especially with boys, focusing just on the hack and slash button. You really want somebody coming in there and say, "Oh, you just killed that goblin," or like that. I mean, yeah, goblins can be evil, but depending on who's observing it at a particular time, you'd be getting in big trouble for that, and especially with school violence that's going on right now.

>> When I, well, this leads into the unit that I did with it, because what we did is we read "The Hobbit" first to really start digging into the fantasy and the journey and the hero's epic. And then from there, we jumped into doing research using Pathfinder and resources, and I'll get more into that later, 'cause I wanna let Mike talk too. But it was, it was very much having to clearly delineate this is leading into this, and this is leading into this, and this is how we're doing it. And then the other thing with that is to focus, you can bring in games that don't focus on hack and slash.

Like one of the systems I've written for is "Essence 20," and they're my little pony system. And the focus on that is friendship is magic. You are rewarded for solving things without combat. And even when you use combat, there's a lot of things in there for it knocks them out. It does not kill them because you don't kill ponies, even if they're bad. So it's a very good system for bringing into younger kids and things like that. And you can still get boy buy-in because there are some really cool things you can do with them, so.

>> That actually, sorry, my brain just squirreled immediately to the "Spider-Man" PlayStation games, where it's like, you don't kill your villains, you knock them out and tie them up, and they're over there now. All right, let's throw it to Mike. How are you?

MIKE KIMMEL: Yeah, so I have kind of two parts to the answer, as I both kind of was the advisor for role-playing game and tabletop game clubs at the schools where I taught. And as far as actually in the classroom, I didn't use games very much, like actually sit down and play a role-playing game, but my teaching involved a huge amount of sort of collaborative simulations, right? Social studies lessons that were learning about court processes by role-playing them essentially with assigned roles for people and processes to follow, doing elections that way, doing deliberations that way. And if you know about like teaching standards and things like that, you know, the measures that we have that we're using to set goals with students, even as a social studies teacher,

I focused a lot more on the sort of speaking and listening skills rather than trying to drill in like historical facts and things like that. And so I found those types of simulations, which are very much like role-playing games in a lot of ways, really helped to drive those kinds of collaborative skills, like, you know, making decisions together, kind of like a party in a Pathfinder game has to make decisions together despite all of their characters having different abilities and different backgrounds, right? Making decisions together in those kinds of lessons or in real life involves bringing in different perspectives, listening to each other, having some sort of method to resolve disagreements, right? We want to go left here. We want to go right here is a very simple one.

But yeah, so kind of both of those things are how I've used a lot of role-playing and role-playing adjacent things.

>> If I may add to that, when you include simulations, yes. Haven't taught government. I did a Congress simulation probably for about 15 years. We're definitely doing simulating that and they have to role-play their parts and then doing mock trials at the high school level. But then I also did a mock trial at the elementary gifted and talented level where you put fairy tales on trial. For instance, you would put Goldilocks on trial for property damage and things like that. Trespassing.

>> Beautiful.

>> That's amazing. I swear there's like a school play or something around that plot line, but I guess you look like you had something else you wanted to add to that.

>> I literally have a book that is fairy tales on trial that I run with my second graders and I mod it down a little bit, but it lets us get into like ethics and conversations and really digging into those moral quandaries and how you do it. Because one of the key stakes in gifted is that social emotional concept because you've got little people who have big emotions and even bigger thoughts. And so bringing in ways to teach them how to really take that and think with it and doing it through simulations, mock trials, things of literature and things where they really can get in and discuss what's going on. Absolutely all of those push towards that.

>> Oh my gosh. So I had a list. I was going to follow the list, but like y'all have so many cool different conversation subjects and just where we're going with this one. I'm gonna jump down to one that I feel like is really close to the conversation right now is that you all like everybody's really interactive.

Everybody's participating in these mock trials and these RPGs and using games, but how do you prevent like outgoing students from taking over and overpowering like the shy kids in role-playing situations like this without dampening their enthusiasm for the game or participation in the classroom?

>> Fine, go ahead, Mike, go ahead.

MIKE KIMMEL: Oh, sure, thank you. Sorry. I see these kinds of simulations and role-playing activities as a way almost to honestly elevate those voices. If, and by those voices, I mean the voices of students who might typically kind of be very quiet or reserved or let other people talk over them. If you have like the routines in place and a protocol, like for example, initiative, right? You're taking turns.

And as long as you have the expectation that like it's not your turn and everyone goes through and everyone has a contribution to make to this discussion, whether it's taking turns back and forth and using a timer, whether it's following, going down a checklist that you know as a class that you have to do everything on the list and that draws everyone's voices out, right? If you've got some kind of routine and you're being consistent with it, it's a really good way to actually elevate those voices and make sure everyone has the time to speak.

Speaking of, I'll let my friends speak.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: Well, Mike, you're absolutely right. That's the routines, the structures. So it was a Congress simulation and everybody had to present their bills. They couldn't get around that. And then they also, everybody had to vote. So we would just keep on taking votes. I said, hey, we're gonna be here longer because if there's 30 of us in the classroom, it needs to add up to 30 of yay, nay or abstain. So they quickly learned that everybody has to participate. Then if you're playing board and card games, when their turn comes up, they have to participate. So games really lend itself to those structures.

And then for those of you who are classroom teachers out there, if you ever take a class on gifted training with me, you do not put the gifted student with non-gifted students to raise up your test scores. That's the worst thing you can do. A gifted student deserves a year's growth just as well as anybody else. You group them with the achieving or high achieving students. You do not put them with the far as far below student. In addition, research shows that if you put the introvert, you put introverts together. So when you put them together, they have to talk.

If you put an extrovert with an introvert, the extrovert will dominate. So if you are doing any kind of grouping, you don't put introverts with extroverts, if you can have structures in place like that.

>> I've discovered that me and all of my other fellow introverted friends get very chaotic when we all get put together. And it's finding just like the right people that you click with to hang out with.

>> Yes, I will agree 100% with everything David is saying. And I will tell you that trying to get those lessons through to people who haven't taken any kind of gifted ed background is very, very hard because they see, oh, our low kids pull up when they're with the higher kids. And it's like, yes, but are you looking at that data driven because it is absolutely the best. And this is just a key thing in general for teaching. If you really wanna help pull your kids up, your low kids should be with one step up into your moderate, your moderate should be with your high moderate, and then your high moderate or high should be with your gifted kids.

But also like David was saying, talking, getting your introverted kids with your introverted, your extroverted with your extroverted, and really putting those personalities together to try and pull it things. The other thing I found with my gifted kids is sometimes I have an introverted gifted kid who is good with an extrovert because they feel safe talking to them. So you also have to really monitor that because like my groups the last couple of years have been like eight kids at a time. And so really looking at where you have your friendships, your kids who gravitate towards working together and things like that because it means where you really want them to be collaborative.

Yes, in a full classroom, you're trying to get more kids to engage and things like that. But at least in gifted classrooms or when you're really wanting this kind of engagement, it is better to go ahead and let the kids work to the people they're comfortable with because you will be able to get more out of them and push them especially your introverted students.

>> I wanna bring in a comment from chat if I can. That kind of speaks to what you were saying about introverted students. We had someone saying that they gave an academic alignment survey to form groups. And it was the most successful groupings I'd ever seen. Thank you Brian Lane.

I was just thinking that so much of teaching is engagement. And if you have students who before you even start the activity have engaged in the process of thinking about their academic alignment or thinking about what role they're going to play and having some voice and choice and agency in that, they're already hooked a little bit into whatever comes next 'cause they've already made a choice and they've chosen like how they're going to participate. So even if they don't often participate, they've kind of decided, well, I'm gonna participate this way and they might be more encouraged to join in the process.

>> That's fantastic. I've also noticed that in our chat, it hasn't been a lot of questions as much as there's been a lot of commentary and responding to the things that y'all been talking about and really good interactions. Because I've made a list and I absolutely refuse to follow that list, so I'm gonna jump back up 'cause we've been asking about how to get everybody participating, but what do y'all do to basically teach these lessons and participation without making it actually feel like schoolwork?

>> Well, it depends on the context. If it's an after school club, yeah, you don't want it to feel like schoolwork. But if it's in the classroom, I don't really have a problem with that. It can be fun, of course, but at any time an administrator is gonna walk into your classroom, they're gonna wanna see the objective and they're gonna ask the kids, why are you doing this? Why are you learning it?

So I think it depends on the context. It needs to look academic depending on the time of day.

>> To bounce off of that, the craziest walk-in observation I ever had was I had the district teaching and learning person walk into my classroom with my principal while my students were throwing paper airplanes around the room. This was as I was teaching sixth grade.

And the first look on their face was shock and what the hell is going on? And then they started talking to my kids.

And I had had a person come in who was a PhD candidate in aerospace education and aerospace engineering. And he had come in because they really were talking. And he had been giving these kids these complex formulas and walking them through how flight and velocity works against the wings. And so he was then building the paper airplanes with them to go over the concepts that they had talked about. And they looked on the board and they see these crazy mathematical and physics formulas on the board. And then they asked my kids and they start explaining exactly what they're doing and how it relates. And both people just turned around and walked out because it was like over their heads.

And yes, this was a gifted class. But it was, we were talking the math and the question that they had asked that actually drove this, because that's one cool thing about gifted is like letting your kids drive some of your curriculum, was they were asking about why math mattered and how it really applied to real world life and everything.

So my friend was like, yeah, I'll come in. I'll teach them some actual applied math just to show them how this works. And so they drove that conversation into those crazy formulas and things. And he really did a great job with like talking them through it. So, but had they not stayed long enough to look at the board or ask my kids questions, that could have gone a very different way with them walking in my classroom and just seeing paper airplanes flying across the room.

>> Context matters is what I pick it up. All right, Mike, do you have anything you wanna add to this one?

MIKE KIMMEL: Oh, I've just got me thinking about a similar time when my supervisor walked in to do a teacher evaluation. And it was during a lesson where I was kind of just sitting back, not doing anything really. So there was nothing to observe about what I was doing, but it was because I had been training my students all semester long in deliberations skills and kind of telling them to get back to kind of the question, telling them that like this routine we're following feels like school because there's two minutes for this side to present their arguments, two minutes for that side, two minutes for the rebuttal and so on and taking notes and all these kinds of questions they had to follow.

But by the end, it's not going to feel like school anymore because I'm going to step back. The teacher is going to step back and you're just going to be doing this yourself like you might do outside of school in the future. And so I think it's okay to have it feel like school if you're doing a game or a simulation and to just be transparent with students about what parts are going to feel like school and why, and then what kind of life skills that you are teaching them to use that hopefully by the end will not feel so much like school and will feel a little bit more like something they want to do and can do and are empowered to do on their own.

So I had a similar moment of my supervisor coming in and being like, the teacher's just sitting there while all of the students are talking. Oh wait, they're actually talking about their deliberation topics and doing learning. It's just looked different than you might expect.

>> Nice, all right. Because I have gone all over this list, I need to find a way to get back onto the list. And also try to keep it on subject so it doesn't feel like I'm just doing a hard right turn to a completely different subject.

But you've talked about all these kinds of interactions and taking initiative and role-play situations. Do the students realize that they're two steps away from being involved in the TTRPG? Have you used this as a way to get students actually introduced to tabletop games themselves? Did that question make any sense?

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: 100%, I'll jump in. Back to the research unit I did with them, the research part of it. It was literally because teaching applied research is hard. Teaching book research is even harder and the more we move into the digital age, even harder. But when they get, especially gifted kids, when you're getting to the higher levels and everything else, they're going to still need to be able to look in a book and figure things out. Because older research, things like that, we still have things in hard copies that you need to be able to understand and how to do it.

So the way that I ran that unit was we were doing, we were creating a character. That was the thing, but they had to write their story and where they were from and everything else. And the way I did it was I literally took my entire Pathfinder 1 library at that time and took it to work and threw it on a table. And I handed them all a packet and it had 10 things that they had to research. And they had to be able to write it, do a summarization of what they found. They had to be able to give the citation for where it was from, what book it was from, where they got it. And then when they built the story for it, they had to still give me a bibliography and everything else for it, like a full research paper.

It just was creative writing, but it still hit every single standard when you look at research writing. So they knew that they were doing research, but the drive was that it was creative, that they were able to think, that they were able to do things. And then at the end of the unit, the deal was they got to actually play a game.

So I did a modified version of The Confirmation from Pathfinder Society 1, because it's like basically the one that everybody's always played. And yes, you're going after a Minotaur, but the Minotaur is very much, yes, this is a catalyst.

Yes, this thing is bad. Yes, you know you're supposed to fight this. And I did a modified version. So it was only that part of the, it was a dungeon crawl, but that was the only fight I left to make it other things. And as we were doing it, we talked a lot about problem solving and working together to really dig into how to do that part.

So they got to play the game that they were excited, 'cause I had a friend who the two of us went through every single one of their research papers to turn them into character sheets. And they played the character they created and researched and knew so much about. And then they were bringing that background knowledge into their role play. So really getting into it and everything. And after that, I had at least four of the boys in that class go, how do I play more?

And I had parents contacting me, not on the negative, but on the positive, because they're like, they brought on this research paper and they're talking about how excited they are and what they got to do with it and how they applied it. And how do I get them more into it? And I told him, I was like, well, here's how you can get a beginner box, which will help really teach them to play and do things themselves.

And I even gave them, I was like, I'll even give you where you can find me outside of school, doing society stuff. And two of my students actually started playing society with me for a while. And it was really a cool crossover. Plus they got to see a teacher in a very different element, which students don't often see, which also is good for building just relationships in general.

And I will tell you because I'm being sentimental right now, that class actually graduated this year. And when they did their walk through the school at the end, 'cause our district takes the graduates to every single school and has them do a walk so that all the kids from preschool up see them and they see their old teachers and everything. And I had a kid from that class literally step out of the graduation line to just hug me and say, thank you. And it was just powerful. So there's my sentimental monument with it.

>> That's okay, I have a really similar one like that with the administrator for my tabletop club in high school, because they basically were my Obi-Wan Kenobi, like freshman year through senior year of high school to the point where I'm like, can I be in their class as well? Like, please put me in their math classes, everything, administration. And then when I graduated high school, they gifted me with a box of their old dragon magazines and their old dungeon magazines. Yeah, unfortunately that box helped pay for some of my textbooks later in college. So there is a comic book and hobby shop somewhere out in Bremerton that has this giant old box of vintage Dungeons and Dragons magazines that paid for my college textbooks and now I am here. So I hope wherever he is, he's proud of me.

But also bringing it back to what David said about like old educational literature, when you said minotaur, my immediate thought was the Odyssey.

>> Yeah.

>> Just like classic literature immediately. Does anybody else want to lean in on this question or like bounce off this conversation?

>> The only time I would advocate is when I saw that I was a particular student that was interested in it, I'd advocate go to your game store or go to a local convention, or I'd find a way to advocate for traditional role playing games if I knew that they were into the computer game side. That was a way in to get them into that.

>> Nice, all right. Actually, speaking of games, Mike, do you have anything before I move on to the next question or not?

MIKE KIMMEL: Let's move on. That's fine.

>> All right, I was going to say, but speaking of those games and game side, do any of you have like any particular favorites that besides Pathfinder, of course, that you like touching on or teaching or using in the classroom? It doesn't have to be a TTRPG. It can be a specific board game. It can be a card builder or a deck builder game, like any that you like using every year. Every new year, you touch back on this game in particular.

>> I'm going to bring up something I did at Gen Con while other people speak.

>> I was going to say, yeah, we can, I can feel the void while you pull it up and hunt it down real fast.

>> I will answer this one then. Two of my go-tos, one of them is Flux. And depending on the grade that I'm teaching determines which version of Flux I pull out, because I may own about eight or nine of them between math, Flux, chemistry, Flux, fairy tale, basic, Marvel, like I have lots of different versions of this game, but it's really good because depending on which grade I'm teaching, which kids I'm working with, how high their reading skills are, I'll pull that out because it's a lot of applied reading and puzzle solving to really figure out which pieces go together to figure out how to play it.

And I'm a meme teacher who's not easy on them when I'm teaching them to play, because I want them to see how the combos work. And then they love it because then they try to beat me. Another one that I love is through Think Fun. They do, and of course I can't think of the name of it right now, but they have a Minecraft one, they have what?

>> Rush Hour?

>> No, not Rush Hour. This one is magnetic and it's logic puzzles. Clue Master is the puppy one. And they have Minecraft, they have a similar one that's Mario, and literally it is, here we're gonna give you a piece of this logic puzzle and then you use the magnets and the steps to start solving it and starts with really easy ones and it progresses them through the whole year.

And I'd use that, I use a couple other logic type games, but that's the one they tend to like the most 'cause it has the magnets that are movable and things. And it's the one that's lasted longest in the classroom for that reason too. But, and I will also throw a plug out here for Think Fun. If you are a teacher and you have Think Fun games and your kids lose pieces, if you contact them and you have your teacher address and your teacher email and you can verify you are an educator, they will send you pieces to replace the pieces so your kids can keep using the game. And the most I've ever been charged is shipping.

>> I was gonna say a really fast power Google to the Think Fun website just has, that says magnetic travel puzzle. So I'm guessing that it's just the name of it and then whatever the theme is in front of it.

>> They're really, really good. And they're really good for single player or partner play. So a lot of the games I use, I try to find stuff that works for single player or partner play because sometimes kids really need to work through things on their own. But those are the two that I teach every year, no matter what those get taught. And then I have a whole factory of other things that go based on kid interest.

>> Do you think we have time for you?

>> I can share my screen if you like.

>> Let me, I'm not sure if I can 'cause I am not the host.

>> Let me see, it looks like it's allowing me to.

>> Oh, let's see what happens, hopefully we don't break it.

>> Is it, do you see that?

>> Did we break it? We broke the Twitch.

>> Oh no.

>> Oh no.

>> We broke the Twitch.

>> It's chaos.

>> It's chaos. I'm sorry.

>> It's like a classroom. (laughing)

>> Sad face.

>> All right, you're gonna have to describe it to us and describe it to the audience as best as you can. And if you want to share the link with me, I can share the link with the audience.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: No, that's okay. Just basically when I presented this at trade day at Gen Con, there was three tiers, there's teacher models, partial play, tier two teachers monitors full play and tier three teacher leads small group instruction. The goal though is to get student led independent play. So what are games that you can model it and then kids can play it on their own and you can have multiple sets.

There'd be Can't Stop, Double Shutter, Blockus, Goblet. See there are a lot of abstract strategy games. Connect Four, that's a great game to teach because the object of the game is in the title. Suro, Guess Who, Chicken Cha Cha Cha. One that requires a little bit more effort and that for kids you would have to definitely monitor as you're playing it.

That would be like Yam Slam or Uno, No Stress Chest, Drop It, Santorini, Sushi Go, Mon Cala, Jungle Speed, Apples to Apples, Bananagrams, No Thanks. And ones where you would have to actually lead, you would have to be the player.

This would be small group instruction if you have pull out for differentiation or after school programs like Azul or Bytes, Drafts, Asaurus, King Domino, Lost Cities, Point Salad, Quirkle. And then the game you can play with a document camera would be like code names. You can play with the whole class or Professor Noggin series or Timeline.

And another one here that would need a document camera could be Wits and Wagers, Story Cubes, 25 Words or Less, and additional ones for total class where you might need to have reproducibles for it, we roll to the top, Set. Every gifted and talented teacher has a copy of Set. Head Full of Numbers, Number Chase, and Catch them Match. So I know I mentioned a lot of different titles there.

On more recent ones is Really Loud Librarians and Word on the Street. In Pit, I have used with total class when you have multiple copies of it, especially different versions. Have you ever used Pit, Mike, when you taught economics?

MIKE KIMMEL: I have not.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: Yeah, it's a commodity trading game. And so you can have multiple copies. You can't have kids mix up. So notice all those games, though, were low complexity. I've taught higher complexity games and small group construction, but those were my list of games that you could reasonably, there's not a lot of rules.

And that's, you gotta get kids comfortable with that first because a lot of them don't have trouble with taking turns. If you really wanna know if a child's even had games in their classroom, just watch how they hold cards and how quickly they destroy cards with their sweaty hands and they bend them. Or if they throw the dice and they fly off the table, you know they haven't really rolled dice before. So we have a whole generation of children that are growing up that haven't played traditional games. And so it's just teaching those basic skills.

We're not even fighting over what color you're gonna be, what game piece you're gonna be is something that they haven't even learned to do some of them.

>> Yeah, I 100%, sorry.

>> No, go ahead.

>> I was gonna say I 100% concur. As you're going through this list, probably a third to half of them are in my box of pullout for school games.

I will say for Set, for anyone that uses iPads in your classroom, especially if you have a singular account that goes on multiple, Set is available on iPad relatively cheap. And I totally agree with David, it is like a base of any gifted program, but you can also use that. Set would be really good with your middle kids and up in a classroom, because you can give it to them and it really starts building those problem solving and that thinking skills, which helps push them in other areas too. If they're learning to problem solve with something abstract, then when you give it to them in a math class or a reading class, it's easier to help them move forward. So having things like that in your classroom as you're early finish your activities is also a really great thing once you're able to teach the basics.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: Yeah, and all those games I mentioned, you could tie into certain curriculum. This depends on what you're teaching. Some of them are math focused or language arts. Set, I know the inventor of Set, she lives in Fountain Hills. She was a chemist and she came up with it when she was looking at traits of flowers.

So if you haven't played Set, but Set you're matching shape, color, shading and number. And Set is when you have all those different, either all different of those traits are all the same. There's even a variation where you can play with less, one less trait down to age five. So you can play this with kindergartners when you remove certain cards. And an interesting thing about that game is that children typically beat adults. So that's why it's fun to play with.

>> Yep, because the abstract thinking, especially the younger kids, they are still more in a place where understanding that is good. And the digital version has the easy and the harder modes.

>> Okay.

>> So it's, yeah, it's really nice. I've had some of my second graders ask to try the harder mode and I've let them, but a lot of it is teaching them back at that lower level. Also, of course I can't remember the name of it, but there is a series of flow free, there we go. Flow free on iPads is another one that is abstract thinking because it's literally connecting dots in a puzzle and it goes further and increases, but it's spatial awareness of figuring out where things need to go in order to put it together and move forward.

>> All right. Mike, do you have any other favorites you wanna bring up?

MIKE KIMMEL: Yeah, but I'm gonna cheat. I'm gonna answer a Jason(?) question because like I said, I used role-playing games themselves, mostly in the context of a club rather than in the classroom. But the most game-like process that I used in the classroom, I talked about deliberation, is a process called structured academic controversy, or SAC, and a really good place to find some resources on this is a free website called "Deliberating in a Democracy," which is geared more toward middle and high school as far as the topics and subject matter. But it's very much like a game in that there are rules and processes and things and students take roles and deliberate public issues.

But the second pitch I want to make is for a book. It is called You Can't Say You Can't Play. And it is about a kindergarten classroom where a educator introduced a rule with her students. And the rule was that you can't say you can't play because they were having struggles with students saying to each other, "No, you can't play, you can't join in the fun, you can't join in the game." And so they made this rule and the book is all about them kind of deliberating the justness of this rule, telling people you can't say you can't play. And if you think about you can't play as a statement, there's probably a lot of organized play volunteers and players in here who've had all kinds of interactions and various environments of people deciding who can or can't play.

And so it's a very interesting book that applies even for much younger kids. Those are my two pitches.

>> Nice, all right, we have about 15 minutes left and we did get a couple of questions from the chat. So I'm gonna go with an earlier one. Does anybody in here have any experience using role-playing games with neurodivergent students?

>> Yes, that's half my GT kids. I'd be willing to bet David also does for the same and similar reasons that I do.

>> Well, there's twice exceptional children that when I was doing board and card games, I grew up with people that would be fit into that label, but not from a, what would you say? I was a teacher at the time.

>> Yeah, the students at our alternative high school were, certainly many of them were neurodivergent. And my experience was that like any other type of lesson, the sort of deliberations that I did worked really well for some of my neurodivergent students and others needed more support, especially those with really particular ways of doing things or high anxiety around speaking and things like that.

And thankfully, you've got students for, in an alternative school for several years in a row, sometimes. And so there were lots of opportunities to work with them and get them involved and up their skills.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: Well, there's students at the prison I know that would do well on a role playing game, but I cannot associate with them outside of the detention center. And for someone I would not want to based on knowing what they had done. So it's sad that they got in trouble, but I don't know if you realize it, but the disproportionate of adults in the prison system are in the Gibson and Talented range. There's research on that. And I'm also finding that also as well in the detention center.

>> Yep, and there's also reading score data that's used literally to determine the number of prison beds based on third and fourth grade reading data.

So I was working with CDF when they launched the Cradle to Prison Pipeline Research Project. And just some of the statistics that go with that, it all lines up and it's sad. So the more we can really engage and work with all of our kids and not just the bottom to the middle, but really reaching up, the more we're able to drive them through, it's great. And one great real quick before I jump back is, if you look at some states that are getting rid of those higher-level classes and getting rid of those higher-thinking classes because they want everybody in the middle, it's actually really sad for many, many, many reasons.

And I worry about you seeing more kids in the detention center because they think outside the box and sometimes outside the box gets them into a lot of trouble. But to jump back, yep, sorry, go ahead.

>> Equity issues because the parents that have the resources, either social resources or economic resources are gonna go to private schools or home school or charter schools where they can drive them and the public schools will suffer. When you get rid of advanced placement programs, would you get rid of, for instance, varsity football? Would you get rid of advanced band? And if the district wouldn't say no to that, then why would you get rid of advanced classes for academically gifted students?

>> Agreed, 100%. And then as far as that neurodivergent, I really think about a kid. That's something that Mike said about circling. When you're in that program with gifted, I've had the same luck of two and three years circling with the same groups of kids. And one that I really think of was when I got him, he would not speak to me at all, 100%. And we moved from not speaking to anyone to speaking with a peer. And then from speaking with that peer to being able to speak to the group if it was a topic he was engaged in to the point that when he was in second grade in the third year I had him straight, I planned a lot of my lessons that year to include sharks and fossils.

Because first of all, most kids like dinosaurs and sharks and fossils, that's fine. But this kid, if you could get him talking about sharks or fossils, he would just open up. And so making sure that that really was brought in for him was helpful, but that is definitely something that's harder to do in a large classroom with a more rigorous curriculum than where I'm at with mine, which is focused on critical and creative thinking, but I bring in reading and math and stuff as part of it. So I realized that that's not the perfect answer because of it being in a more specialized group that I was able to do it. But it definitely is something you see. - To your point, for the five years that you have to pull out, and then five years after that I was an administrator in the program, but I saw the same kids like you did at the same school from sometimes first grade. 'Cause we serviced all the way down to first grade. Some states are different. We actually identify in kindergarten.

So first to sixth, I would see the same kid. And this was 20 years ago, maybe 20. They used to have the Asperger's label. They don't use that label anymore, but for those who were socially, since all my lessons dealt with playing board and card games, they really helped those kids out that needed the social, emotional, intelligence work done.

>> All right, that's honestly a serious topic that I wish we had more time to really delve into. Just like school systems and the way things are going and programs versus sports programs versus art programs versus these programs. But we do only have about 10 minutes left.

And I feel like, do we wanna leave a little bit of a higher note? Do we have any fun anecdotes from the classrooms? Without embarrassing any of our past, present or future students, are there any really fun stories so we can leave this on a high note?

>> I just have kind of a general memories, I think similar to the ones that I just shared earlier of not just students, but parents who, I had a parent who after my first year teaching, which was also my first year running kind of tabletop gaming at lunchtime for my students who wrote a letter, not to me, but to my principal saying, "Hold on to this teacher, he changed my student's life." And so not through anything I did in the classroom necessarily, but just by giving the student a space where they could be them and they could play games and they could make friends, which they had not been successful in middle school and making friends. And so just games matter to students and in ways that we don't always realize. They're just games, right? But it's community, right? It makes a difference.

>> Any other final anecdotes, thoughts, fun stories that we want to share?

>> Well, I would just point out what Mike was saying. It's not, definitely it's not just games. Play is part of almost all living species engage in some kind of play. And games, we were playing games before alphabetic writing. We know that from archeological evidence. In terms of my story, I would teach in Title I schools. And so it's very high poverty. And I remember a particular sister and brother that were both in the program. They didn't have money to buy games, but she would actually make coPaizo the games you would play by hand, which was amazing to me.

And I've had some of my former students contact me on my YouTube channel. I do how to plays and playthroughs on there and they've reached out to me. 'Cause I've always, I would actually point out to them, so just keep in mind what we're doing here. Here is the objective, why we're doing this, how it ties into the theme 'cause we teach them automatically every year. I mentioned causality being one.

But where's my point? Gee, I just forgot. Well, I would say you might not have this, you may remember this experience you had and you might not get unfortunately get a chance to play games again when you get into middle school and high school. And, but you could at least pass this down onto, if you have children someday.

>> That's fantastic.

>> Mine is much, much lighter than that. I, so I've taught in Title I in inner city my entire teaching career. And I always end up with, in addition to my gift to kids, I always end up with two or three of the kids who, no one else really knows what to do with them or how to handle them. They're not identified gifted, but they're massive ADHD or unstable home life or just something that's really got them. And I end up with those kids every year. And one of them I had this year, he was awesome.

And they had a game day where the kids could bring their electronic devices to school. They convinced me to bring my Switch 'cause they know I play games outside of school and to bring Mario Kart. And I kid you not, we just played Mario Kart for the whole hour. And his most exciting thing was when he got to jump up and down because he beat me because I beat him three rounds straight before that. And again, they're warned if they wanna play games with me, then we're gonna play games and that's how this is gonna work. So-

>> There's no letting kids win in this one.

>> No, exactly. I'm like, I know how I'm going to play. That's how this works. But it's cool because of how much you see them light up when they figure out how to do a thing you can't and they win and it just makes them excited. And so, yeah, that's mine is just these kids who you, like I said, they're not necessarily GT, but they're kids who I'm able to really touch base and reach out with because I'll pull them in and we'll play a game and then while we're playing, we'll talk about what's wrong and what's going on and we'll really touch base and they get people that listen to them.

And I really think the therapeutic and tabletop RPGs in two hours is going to definitely get better into that than I can in a couple of moments, but it's still just the relationship building side of it and what you can bring in to kids who wouldn't necessarily get it otherwise because I agree with when you're teaching title one and you're teaching low income schools, they don't always have exposure to this stuff, but the more you bring in and expose and then can help them find the resources or get them, the more you're really gonna bring those kids forward.

>> Yeah, a personal story. You're talking to that therapy session. I was actually in special ed in elementary school. I was two grades behind. I had delayed maturation, stuttering, lazy eye, and then I dropped out of high school with dysgraphia and ADHD. I overcame a lot of those problems, but the reason why I'm pointing this out is that when I was eight years old, my brother started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1979. So that's what helped me overcome a lot of my academic skills.

I had a chance to tell Gary Gygax that in person at Gen Con I think in 2000 that how much D&D made a difference for me. And reading a college level book motivated me where I was starting to read the rules of squad leader in middle school. So that helped me overcome a lot of my academic issues and my social issues was role playing.

>> Yeah. I mean, he's 1000%.

>> I have my t-shirt here. (laughing)

>> Wonderful.

>> I love it so much.

>> Okay, so I have been doing the green room running of all of the staff, I'll pass it on all weekend. I've been yelling at everybody to wrap it up early and wrap it up early. And so now I am the hypocrite by taking us all the way up to time. But this has been a really, really fantastic conversation with all of you guys.

We have like a minute left if we wanna like speed round where people can find you, if you want them to find you, whether it be on your websites or your social media. And I am really sorry to cut this all off because these stories and anecdotes have been great. So I'm gonna throw it to Mike and then we will go around and I'm gonna let everybody go. I'm so sorry and thank you so much.

MIKE KIMMEL: I'm Mike Kimmel, he/him. You can find me mike.kimmel@paizo.com or in the Discord.

DAVID NIECIKOWSKI: And I'm Dave Niecikowski, just put my name together. You can look for me on YouTube. And if you wanna look at my free resources on my webpage, just http://davidniecikowski.com. Like I said, you can download the performance list if you want to write better rulebooks.

>> I'm so sorry we didn't get to talk deeper into that one this year.

>> No, it's okay.

>> Like I've been taking notes all weekend. I'm like, we have to have two-hour panels. These can't be an hour long anymore. These are too short for everybody. And Ivis.

IVIS K. FLANAGAN: Okay. I can be found on Blue Sky and Discord as Northern Dreamer. Always feel free to drop me a line, message me. You can also email me at ikflanagan@gmail.com. And I do my best to get back with people, but sometimes I'm slow.

>> All right. And then in the Discord chat, if you are a part of the Discord this weekend, we do have a post-chat small thread called Teaching in TTRPGs in the post-panel discussion. If any of our lovely panelists wanna hang out there and chat, it's entirely voluntary for everybody. It's just an extra place in case anybody wants to keep the conversation going.

And I am officially the hypocrite. We are a minute to 12. That means we're a minute from the GM's Tips and Tricks. Thank you everybody. And thank my guests. Have a good weekend all.

I will see you all in about a couple of hours for the TTRPGs and Therapeutics panel. Thank you.