KyEdRPG Spotlight: Ben Little and his Periodic Table TTRPG

When I presented about TTRPGs in education at the Aurora Institute Symposium last year, one of the attendees was Benjamin Little, a secondary science teacher in Massachusetts.  Mr. Little teaches as part of "an innovative, competency-based program at Brookline High School for up to 48 students, entering grades 10-12, who feel they will find more intellectual satisfaction and be more academically successful in a non-traditional setting," where "students get the chance to experience engaging, experiential learning that takes thematic topics and explores them in great depth – often culminating in performance-based assessments" ("About ACE").

As I heard about his clever approaches of incorporating some TTRPG-style play in his classroom, I was intrigued.  After we talked briefly at the conference, we promised to stay in touch.  

Ben -- or "Mr. Ben," as his students call him -- has tried some new things since our November meeting, and in the spirit of reflection we all find ourselves doing at the end of the school year, I thought it might be a good opportunity to celebrate his accomplishments! Here is our interview.

Ben, welcome to Edtech Elixirs!  Share your educator story.

I began teaching biology in 2006 in Tanzania, where I was stationed for the Peace Corps. I spent the next decade adding science subjects, countries, and states to my teaching repertoire. It was the perfect preparation for the job I have now, teaching Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Forensics and Nutrition to mixed grade level classes of sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the ACE program at Brookline High School.

What kinds of games do you personally play?

I’ve been interested in the fantasy and sci-fi genres since I was old enough to read. I distinctly remember the original Final Fantasy video game on Nintendo, and how immersed I became. I have been playing games ever since, although my experience with full-blown TTRPGs has been limited.

You’ve shared in previous conversations that you use a TTRPG gaming mechanic in your Chemistry class.  Share what you’re doing, and how it’s evolved and changed.

Student art of the character Plutonium.

I invented a TTRPG to teach the periodic table that I call Elementopia.

The unit on the periodic table is traditionally one of the most boring units in chemistry, as teachers focus on atomic radii, electron configurations, and ionization energies. This reductivist approach can help some students see the patterns that will become important later on to understand bonding patterns and molecular formation, but it completely misses the depth of properties that the elements have or what technological applications any of them are used for. For any students not interested in chemistry for chemistry’s sake, this is a huge turnoff, as they don’t even know why they’re supposed to be learning all of this boring garbage.

I started doing an “adopt an element” project to get students to become familiar with elements’ personalities. This finally got them to appreciate the character and uses of a single element, but students still didn’t learn much about trends of properties across the table or, for some, spark their interest.

Student art of the character Fluorine.

I then had them illustrate their elements, personifying them as characters. They would incorporate a number of properties into their designs, and put it on a poster with information about its properties and uses. These really got students engaged, but I noticed that they still weren’t necessarily learning the trends on the periodic table, and realized I needed a different product.

Next, I invented a simple turn based game where they would turn their research about properties into character attribute scores. I took the basic mechanic from Dungeons & Dragons, but modified the attributes to reflect chemical and physical properties. Some of them were the same, like Strength and Constitution, but things like their magical ability and Charisma changed to Reactivity and Luster. The scores for the attributes were determined by the properties the element displayed: Strength would depend on density, hardness, and weaponization, Dexterity on malleability and state at room temperature, Reactivity on toxicity, flammability, ionization energy and electronegativity, etcetera, with a total attribute score calculated by adding up the points from each indicator.

Once they had their character's attributes, they needed to come up with attacks and defenses. These could be based on attributes, such as “I am going to body slam you with my density,” but students also needed to incorporate uses and applications, like “I negate your electricity attack because my element is used in lightning rods.” The power of each move is based on the attribute score that it draws from plus the roll of a 6 sided die. One character attacks while the other tries to defend, and the one with the highest power move (attribute plus roll) wins out, as in if the attack score is higher the attack is successful but if the defense move is stronger no damage is inflicted.

Student art of the character Sulfurious.

The first round of this was fun, but it quickly became apparent that I needed a lot more structure. I added hyperlinks to the character attribute sheet to resources and tables to streamline the research process. I simplified the basic attacks so that they all inflict one Hit Point (HP) of damage after a student who ran the D & D club at the school made a broken Boron dragon whose moves were all ridiculously overpowered. I added the opportunity to get creative by allowing a single super move and single passive ability that could afflict conditions, break the simple turn based mode, or do extra damage.

At this point the kids were really into it, but the tournament at the end was kind of a let-down because they did all this work then only used their character once or twice. So, I added other modes of play, like exhibition matches, where they could gain experience points by playing each other for homework outside of class that would increase their base HP. I had prizes for winning battle royales and beating raid bosses like score boosts or 8 sided die that they could upgrade to. Kids really got into it!

Student art of a Mercury Alien.

To learn about all the trends on the periodic table, I came up with lore. Each elemental family acts like a class of character. Students in the same family have to write a tome of lore, or family biography, about their group. I make these available to students, and have an assignment where I ask them to identify strategies for playing against other elements. Finally, I was getting most students to learn about all the trends on the periodic table, because they wanted to win!

I noticed that the emphasis on competition was not motivation for some students, or even turned some anxious kids off, though. After all, they could still pass if they made a character but didn’t ever win. So, in my most recent revision of the game, I’m adding a mandatory campaign mode. I’m turning the periodic table into a “map of Elementopia” that they will use as an actual game board. In each region, there is a boss element that exemplifies that group of elements that they must defeat by strategically teaming up with each other to make a party that will counter that boss’s strengths and capitalize on its vulnerabilities. The cooperative nature of it should appeal to those kids that shy away from competition, and finally require that they really understand not just some, but all of the groups on the periodic table.

That's all so amazing! And kudos to you for all the work you've put into this project. How have the students reacted?

Students that have never played games are initially apprehensive, but it’s so highly scaffolded that they don’t usually have difficulty. Students that are really artistic or are gamers are always really excited, and many of them will start planning their character’s units before the project begins or continue playing the game long after the class has ended. The most interesting take is from students that took chemistry and didn’t pass it in the mainstream before coming to ACE; they all start out thinking they hate chemistry then fall in love with it. I just had one of those students visit me. They are studying music production in university now, but their favorite leisure activity is watching chemistry videos on YouTube. Most students really enjoy and learn a lot from the game, and a few have even made characters without taking the class because they just want to.

It could certainly be a challenge to convince non-gamer students to give this kind of instruction a try. It sounds like you've built in some very helpful supports.

Thank you! As I mentioned, the competitive nature of the tournament is off-putting for students with anxiety, and the open-ended nature of the moves can be hard for students on the autistic spectrum and other "concrete thinkers" to wrap their minds around. The cooperative modes that I’ve added have helped the anxious ones, and sitting with me to concretize ideas has helped those for whom abstraction is a barrier.

Besides some reluctant students, what other challenges have you encountered?  How did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge that I’m facing now is the traditional thinking of chemistry educators. It remains one of the most traditional, formulaic, and pedantic fields of both science and education. Most of them think there’s only one way to learn chemistry, even if that doesn’t work and isn’t interesting for many students. They also don’t value the completely novel content that the project inserts: nowhere in chemistry do they actually talk about technological applications or the intersection between physics properties like conductivity and magnetism. Most other teachers think what I do is boutique and cute; I think I have revolutionized the way that the unit on the periodic table can be taught, and made chemistry relatable for everyone, not just formulaic thinkers.

I plan to overcome this by going above and beyond. I’d love to launch a website that students can use to create characters. Every normal person that I talk to wishes they had learned the periodic table this way. Once enough people know that it’s possible, I hope that other chemistry teachers  will take notice. This actually started to happen after we met at Aurora 2024; students that saw the project in a workshop went home, found the chemistry teacher in the hallway, and demanded that he contact me about how to do the project. I hope that even more will contact me after reading this.

Student art of Dragoron the Boron Dragon.

Do you have some future plans for using TTRPGs in the classroom?

I plan to develop a version of Elementopia that is less work; it would still be educational, but more focused on storytelling and game play and geared towards the masses. That will probably be my retirement project.

I also use games in a bunch of my other classes. I use a game to teach about natural selection in evolution, competition and carrying capacity in population dynamics, the cycling of Carbon in climate change, and more! Most of these don’t rise to the threshold of TTRPGs, but I do have an idea for a TTRPG about the dueling energy and environmental crises. In it, students would play as countries. They would have to produce energy via various methods (solar, geothermal, nuclear, wind, coal, etcetera) to meet constantly rising energy demand, while also tabulating greenhouse gas outputs and avoiding catastrophic climate change. Each nation/character would have affordances and limitations according to its economic and political approach. For example, Germany would get to start with lots of wind but couldn’t develop nuclear power, or China would be able to build plants quickly due to government sponsored industry but would have their energy demand grow faster because of rapid modernization.

That would be a great educational tabletop role-playing game!  Last question. What advice would you give to an educator who wants to start using TTRPGs instructionally with their students?

Don’t get intimidated. It doesn’t have to be perfect to still be good, and you can tweak it continually to make it better, like how I developed my project over many iterations. Enlist student feedback! I use former students as bosses, and even had a few help me balance the attributes of the game so that no one attribute would be overpowered compared to others.

Thank you Mr. Little for all you do for your students!  Be sure to reach out directly to Ben via email with any questions, comments, or feedback.

This interview was slightly edited and condensed.

Google Science Journal

Three and a half years ago, I wrote a blog entry titled "Garlic Necklace, Not a Silver Bullet."  I discussed how we need to embrace the messiness of multiple solutions instead of trying to find the perfect one.  This is especially true if you are trying the seek a single student edtech device that you hope achieves all goals: "While your 1:1 device may be one kind of device, you still have access to laptop carts, iPads, and computer labs (with large desktop hard drives and powerful processors) for specialized work.  And speaking of devices that do specialized work, let's not forget that many students already carry one in their pocket: a smartphone."

That last part -- how do we find ways to integrate instead of ban the powerful microprocessor many students carry around in their pocket? -- echoed in my head when Heidi Neltner recently introduced me to a new mobile Google app, Science Journal.  It is available for iOS and Android and requires a smartphone or tablet; according to their site, it will also work for "some" Chromebooks that can install Android apps.  But once you get past the device and installation hurdle, it is free and an amazing resource for science classrooms.

How does it work?  After installing Science Journal, you will need to give it permission to access your device's microphone and camera.  You will also need to state your age, as Google wants users to be 13 and older; it only asks for this once on the first time you open the app.  (This strikes me as a bit odd, since no personal data can be collected, as no account creation is possible and you cannot yet link it to a Google Drive account. That said, it does collect and send anonymous data unless you turn this off in the app's settings.)

The app starts with a "Welcome to Science Journal" experiment example you can play with, edit and archive.  (Similar to Google Keep, you can "clear the screen" by archiving experiments that can be retrieved later, or of course you can delete them.)  Creating a new experiment is as easy as hitting the purple "+" button in the lower right.

Once inside an experiment, you can edit the title at the top by clicking the top right pencil.  The top half of the screen is where data and notes are captured.  The bottom half (which can be slid up to take up the entire screen) is where you have four icon choices.  The first allows you to make journal text entries.  The third allows you to take pictures; with the fourth, you can insert images.  The second icon is where the magic happens, as this is where you choose a sensor reading tool.

You have the following sensor tools to choose from: Ambient Light (lux), Sound Intensity (dB), Pitch (Hz), Linear Accelerometer (m/s squared), Accelerometers for X, Y and Z axis, Barometer (hPa), Compass (degrees), and Magnometer.

By utilizing your device's various sensors -- accelerometers, light sensor, microphone, compass -- Science Journal allows you to see real time data as you move the device or expose it to sound, light and other stimuli.   By hitting the icon in the lower left black band, you can take a picture "screenshot" of the data which gets added to your experiment's top half data collection area.  By hitting the red button, you can make a playable "recording" of data that is added to your collection area.  By sweeping up and hitting a grey "+" button underneath, you can open another "card" for a different sensor reading tool to happen simultaneously.

Last but not least, you can make some adjustments to the sensor reading tool by hitting the three dots on the right of the sensor tool name.  One of the options is to "enable audio."  This creates some pronounced auditory feedback as the data input changes!  (You also hear this in the data "recordings" discussed above.)

One word of caution.   Speaking to colleagues about this app, a common concern discussed is students getting . . . ahem . . . so excited about science that they risk damaging their device as they enthusiastically gather data.   While protecting school devices is important, you also want to be able to tell an unhappy parent if little Johnny breaks his iPhone that you had a thorough class conversation about proper management and care of technology.  Even better: if you are asking for students to install the app on their own devices, a letter home stating your purpose and getting parent permission first may be a good proactive choice.  (You know what?  That 13 and older age requirement may now be making more sense.)

How could you use it?  The ability to use this app in a science classroom or lab (individually, in collaborative groups, or in a station rotation) is pretty self-explanatory.  The key is that Science Journal empowers students to be experiential, inquiry-based learners.  I imagine this app could be helpful in the prototyping and early research stage of Design Thinking.   The journal entries jotted in the app could be the beginnings of deeper reflections or detailed lab reports, and would then be copied and pasted into other places such as Google Docs.   (Consider taking screenshots that you can plug in as images inside a Google Doc, Slide or Drawing.)  And why not have a cross-content PBL with science and music?  The band OK Go has an educational site full of "inspiring tools for playful learning," and some of their experiments (like this one) specifically utilize the Science Journal app as a music making tool!

Remember that you can get teacher resources, experiment ideas, and other help on the Science Journal site.

Downsides?  I wish Science Journal could work as a web-based product, perhaps through a Chrome Extension, but keep in mind that anything bigger than a tablet begins to get unwieldy as you start flipping, spinning and moving your device around to take readings.  More importantly, I hope that it soon allows integration into your Google Drive account, so your experiments could at least be saved to the cloud and possibly shared and published.

If you are using Science Journal, share your stories in the Comments below!

Update 9/22/20: Google announced that the Science Journal app will be removed from the iOS and Google Play Stores after December 11, 2020, at which point Arduino will be creating their own app version built on Google's open source code.  This will eventually re-integrate Google Drive with Arduino's version of the app, but that won't be the case on day one.  If you have already installed the app, it will not be removed from your device, nor will your data be deleted -- however, Google will no longer support the app with updates or help.  For more on the announcement, click here.

The $100,000 Glove: Reflections on Object Based Learning

It was March of this year, and as I was walking down the hall of East Middle School, I passed the  library.  A guest speaker caught my eye.  I slid in as unobtrusively as possible, but I could have marched in with clanging cymbals and it wouldn't have mattered; Daryl Woods was keeping middle school students silent and rapt with attention.

Mr. Woods, a manager at NASA who works on programs for the International Space Station, was discussing the final frontier.  I saw an object, a bit frayed and worn, being passed among the students.  As it reached the back of the room, the last student took pity on my curiosity and gave it to me.  It was an astronaut suit glove.  Just as some middle schoolers had done, I automatically slid my hand inside.  A nearby teacher came over to whisper, "That glove has been in space.  It costs $100,000!"

I marveled and made a one-tenth of a million dollar thumbs up.

Here I am, wearing a $100,000 glove that has been in space. Not a bad way to start the day. Special thanks to NASA's Daryl Woods for spending time with students at East Middle School! #shelbyedchat

A post shared by Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) on Mar 13, 2017 at 12:48pm PDT

In all the theoretical, abstract talk about air pressure and solar radiation and the fragility of human life in the merciless vacuum of space that I have read or seen in documentaries, I was never moved as much as I was when wearing that glove.  Someone before me had worn this and touched the cosmos.  And a pair of these cost more than my house.  Space travel was suddenly not as mundane or as easy or as dismissible as our present near-apathy would have you believe.  It was concrete; it was now.  Interacting directly with the object had sparked something in me -- wonder, and whimsy.

And that is what object based learning (OBL) is all about.  It is, as defined by David Smith, a "student-centered learning approach that uses objects to facilitate learning" where students are "interrogating physical artefacts" that become "multi-sensory 'thinking tools'" (per his excellent article "What is Object Based Learning?").    Another powerful OBL definition in under 140 characters:

1/2 Objects that tell human stories and create a sense of investigation. Objects that you have to look at closly to puzzle out #AskACurator

— Orange Museum (@ORMuseum) September 13, 2017

As the source of the tweet suggests, the idea of "object based learning" could easily go back to the best museum experiences, where the intimacy of literally touching history, or peering at something as close as the end of your nose, invites questions and inquiry.  However, usually a museum suggests the need for a field trip that entails leaving your school.  Or does it?

The public school district in Grand Rapids, Michigan was in steady decline for two decades.   Families fled as the academic performance of the schools sank.  When Teresa Weatherall Neal took over as superintendent, she needed to shake the system up quickly.  In the fall of 2015, one of her boldest moves was placing a secondary school inside of the Grand Rapids Public Museum.   As Beth Hawkins details in her article "When Your School is a Museum," the innovative Grand Rapids Public Museum School earned the district a multi-million dollar grant.  With students interacting directly with the museum's vast collection, it's a perfect example of hands-on OBL.  In a way, it's a "flipped field trip," as the day to day learning occurs inside a museum and home is where they ponder how to next interact with the curated materials or synthesize their schema.  (While the original page is part of a site that is no longer online, the school's curriculum overview and different approach to schooling is available here at an archived link.) The Grand Rapids Public Museum School continues to add to its roster and it is on track to be a grade 6-12 school by 2022.  (Update: as of July 2025, the school is now named "Grand Rapids Public Museum High School" with grades 9-12.)

Housing a new school inside a museum might be a difficult proposition, especially if you are in a suburban or rural environment with limited large scale facilities.  And yet, many small towns at least have a historical society or a small local museum.  What if a teacher or a school partnered with them?  When inside such a place, what could students learn from their collected objects?  What unique learning would they experience?  And what projects could the students accomplish that will enlarge and enliven the goals of such a museum or historical society for the twenty-first century?

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The collections inside a museum create OBL opportunities, but when seen as a whole, the museum invites the idea of place based learning, where the museum itself is the centerpoint of learning on multiple topics.  (Other examples could be learning about the life cycle of trees from being inside an actual forest, or discussing Gettysburg while walking the battlefield.) But OBL could be seen as the heart of several pedagogical overlapping circles. OBL is often a close kin to experiential learning, as the exposure to an object creates a desire to do and apply in order to gain knowledge.  OBL and project based learning also have a relationship, in that both depend on authenticity and impact in the real world.  Certainly one or more of these learning strategies could include OBL.  So how could OBL alone function as an overarching principle in a class?

Here is where the popular idea of "100 Objects" gets traction.  Imagine grounding a class conceptually by teaching history, art, sports, literature (perhaps find metaphorical objects that tie into the text's theme!), math and science through approximately three objects a week.  Try searching "100 objects" in your favorite online bookstore and you can see the depth and variety of subjects that apply this idea.  It has even affected pop culture, as the below Whovian volume I recently found at a used book store indicates:

In a perfect world, you could pass objects of historical significance around, but there are other options:

• Have students interact with digital representations of actual artifacts, manipulating them in three dimensions.   Smithsonian X 3D has a growing digital repository based on their own enormous collections.  Many of these have built in "tours" that give context and prompt questions about the object.
• Use a 3D printer to create and print out objects.  In fact, the Smithsonian X 3D site above offers STL and OBJ files you can download and print your own "copies" of artifacts.
• Use high resolution imagery.   For example,  much art has been captured and can be scrutinized in ways that would be impossible to do in person; macrophotography can be great lead-ins to talking about everyday materials from a different perspective.

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We come full circle back to middle school.

A few weeks ago, as I was drafting this entry, my eighth grade daughter had a mock schedule where I traveled through her classes.  Her social studies teacher demonstrated how he shares, about once a week, an historical "artifact."  It may just be a slide on the screen, but the mysterious objects shown without context or explanation spark questions and creative analysis.  What is it?  How is it used?  How would the use and invention of the object be influenced by the time it was made in? His goal is to get students to think like historians.  OBL, practically in my backyard!

If object based learning, with its "multi-sensory" authenticity, creates nothing else but a shift in the pedagogical purpose of a class -- from, say, learning history to being historians -- it has important value.  For that alone, it deserves a thumbs up.

Note 7/27/25: The original "Grand Rapids Public Museum School" website is no longer active and now has been folded into its district's site, renamed to reflect grade levels 9-12.  I've therefore updated a few links and added a parenthetical above.