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.

A republished blog entry with Aurora Institute, and a podcast appearance!

Today will be a short blog entry just to highlight some recent multimedia appearances.

Back in January 2022, I wrote "From Good to Great, Initial to Ideal: A Way to Improve Exhibitions and Other Performance Assessments."  CompetencyWorks (the blogging arm of Aurora Institute) felt my piece fit thematically with some other current work in the field of innovative education and in blog entries they have been recently writing, and therefore republished it on May 15.  Special thanks to Laurie Gagnon, the CompetencyWorks Director, for thinking of me and sharing my writing!

This school year, I've spent some time and Edtech Elixirs space on the intersection of tabletop role-playing games and education, starting with my launch of Kentucky Educators for Role Playing Games in August 2022.  I've been humbled, flattered, and honored for opportunities to talk about KyEdRPG in Kentucky Teacher, a television episode of Kentucky Edition, and an article for Next Generation Learning Challenges.   The latest adventure involves Tom Gross and Dan Reem's podcast Teachers in the Dungeon, where they had me on as a guest for their May 16 episode.

I had a lot of fun talking with Dan and Tom, and special thanks to both of them for having me on. I hope you give the episode a listen (42 minutes, if you need to plan accordingly!), and while you're at it, subscribe to their excellent series, available on multiple podcast platforms.  

As the school year wraps up, my fervent wish for all the educators out there is to have a chance to catch their breath, spend time with family and friends, and recharge their batteries.  Enjoy a much needed rest!

From Good to Great, Initial to Ideal: A Way to Improve Exhibitions and Other Performance Assessments

When our district began its journey into competency-based education (CBE), one of the significant early steps was the publication of our Profile of a Graduate (PoG) in 2017.  The Profile was crucial in developing our current Strategic Leadership Plan for 2018-2022, where Personalized Learning is the top strand.  "Embedded Performance Assessments" -- demonstrated applications of student knowledge intentionally timed at key points of a student's learning path -- is a feature mentioned throughout that strand, and one of our frequent examples of such an assessment is student exhibitions: a culminating celebratory event where they can "show what they know," often with the attendance of parents and community members as an audience.

From a certain perspective, student exhibitions are not new.  Indeed, if the phrase conjures up images of a junior high science fair with trifold presentation boards, homemade dioramas and solar system mobiles, or perhaps cute elementary students dressed up as famous people for a living wax museum, you would be forgiven. But there is a difference when defining exhibitions in the context of CBE or as a high quality performance assessment.  Features of such an exhibition would include the instructional intentionality in how they are designed and assigned by teachers, the agency of the students behind them, and the depth of the mastery of learning the exhibition can demonstrate.  Furthermore, if your objectives from student exhibitions include students producing rich artifacts of learning and having some practice runs leading up to a rigorous Defense of Learning performance summative assessment -- more on both of these later -- it is imperative that students exhibit and exhibit often.  

For a further exploration and explanation of the power of student exhibitions, watch this short video (2:14) from High Tech High:

Our district was not naive about what it would take to achieve these richer and deeper exhibition experiences.  Teachers needed to learn strategies and see good models for student-centered learning; students could not become empowered, confident, and self-directed overnight.   However, one of the wisest moves from our leadership was to encourage our teachers, and by extension students, to just try.   We knew that some of our earliest exhibitions would be rough and wouldn't look much different than those old fashioned science expos with the trifold presentation boards, but we had to start somewhere, so we could baseline, learn, and improve.  While we are still (and should always be!) "becoming" and improving, we can use the integration of our Profile of a Graduate as an example of how exhibitions have deepened and gotten better.  At first, students may have been asked to reflect on a Profile competency or two at the very end of the process, if at all, perhaps as an afterthought ("Reflect on which PoG competency you think this exhibition best exemplifies").  But then we developed single-point rubrics to measure whether the student met the competency . . . teachers began developing exhibitions with an intentional focus on a PoG competency made clear to the student from the start . . . and we are in the process of launching four point mastery scales on the PoG competencies to better assess the student's "performance."

The launch of the Profile of a Graduate five years ago certainly gave us a new "why" for student exhibitions and a way to deepen and better measure student learning. But looking back and looking forward, what if we had a tool or a more insightful lens to look at performance assessment more effectively?  

This is where an excellent book enters stage left: Deeper Competency-Based Learning: Making Equitable, Student-Centered, Sustainable Shifts by Karin Hess, Rose Colby, and Daniel Joseph (Corwin, 2020).  I'm halfway through reading it as an anchor text for my chosen SCPS PD strand this year, and in full disclosure (and to my delight), Rose Colby also joins Shelby County periodically to virtually lead workshop sessions on CBE for myself and other CBE strand learners.**   Deeper Competency-Based Learning is dense in the best sense of the term, full of CBE shift strategies, rubrics, and metrics to measure where you are in competency-based education and where you want to be.

In their chapter "Making Shifts in Teaching and Learning Structures," the authors share a table of criteria types to plan performance assessments (Table 3.6, page 94).  The criterion types, example questions typically answered by each type, and the Depth of Knowledge (DOK) one would usually expect for each type, are as follows:

• Process: "Will the student follow particular processes (e.g. procedures for a science investigation; data collection; validating credibility of sources)?" [DOK 2]
• Form: "Are there formats or rules to be applied (e.g. correct citation format, organize parts of lab report; use camera shots/visuals; edit for grammar and usage)?" [DOK 1]
• Accuracy of Content: "List essential domain-specific terms, calculations, concepts, or principles to be applied." [DOK 1 or 2]
• Construction of New Knowledge: "How will the student go beyond the accurate solution and correct processes to gain new insights and raise new questions? Are there any personal success skills that might also be employed?" [DOK 3 or 4]
• Impact:  "How will the final product achieve its intended purpose (e.g. solve a complex problem; persuade the audience; synthesize information to create a new product/performance)?" [DOK 3 or 4]

The authors point out that "[a]ll rubric criteria do not need to be included for every summative assessment, but they should [all] be considered during the design phase," with a particular emphasis on Construction of New Knowledge and Impact for performance assessments that are to truly assess deeper learning (94).  Furthermore, these criteria are an excellent first step for either designing a new performance assessment or analyzing an existing one. Additional steps include considering an authentic context for application, identifying a proper format for such a demonstration, determining how much students will have voice and choice in the process or product, and last but not least, identifying and aligning success criteria to the task (94-95).

All of this brings us back to student exhibitions.  Even as many exhibition examples in our district often had a "good" quality to them, I struggled to articulate feedback in what could make them "great."  One thing I realized early on was the need to present an original idea, rather than just a regurgitation of what others have said or done, no matter how well it is packaged or communicated.  Put another way when I was discussing project-based learning in a previous blog entry: "It is not transformative learning if the end result...is merely a well presented aggregation of researched bullet points instead of a new idea or creation that shows real reflection and growth of student thinking."  (Note also that the word choice of the criterion Impact, as well as its definition, can strongly suggest how a well designed PBL can end in a high DOK performance assessment that "impacts" the community outside of the four walls of a school.)

It was this insightful criteria from Deeper Competency-Based Learning that illuminated how I could improve the way I evaluate and give feedback on performance assessment.   Firstly, as the authors point out, there is nothing inherently wrong with a performance assessment that only remains at the level of Process, Form, and/or Accuracy of Content (and by extension, at DOK 1 or 2).  I will label these as Initial performance assessments. Depending on the intentionality of the lesson/unit design, this might very well be instructionally sound -- for example, perhaps the competency is only being introduced and full mastery would not be expected.  The issue is when a teacher either stays at the Initial level for all such assessments for the entire course, or worse, misinterprets a performance assessment best designed only for these lower levels as a demonstration of mastery.   For a performance assessment to truly apply a student's knowledge with depth, the student should "gain new insights," "raise new questions," "employ personal skills" (like the ones from our Profile of a Graduate!), "solve a complex problem," "persuade an audience," and/or "synthesize information to create a new product or performance."  I would label these Construction of New Knowledge and Impact performance assessments as Ideal, especially if a student's mastery of learning (with a task at DOK of 3 or 4) is your goal.

This concept of Initial and Ideal can be further applied to other semantic aspects of teaching and assessment, as we transition from the traditional to the transformational.  For example, an Initial "folder" might contain artifacts selected by the student, but the wording shows a limited goal; it may be more concerned with being a container of student work, rather than with the depth of the work contained, and an emphasis on an end product rather than an ongoing process.  An Ideal "portfolio," on the other hand, can suggest a living collection ever changing, expanding, and improving over time; a perpetual artifact curation that should spur a student on to continually reflect on their growth academically and personally.   While this process of a portfolio may eventually culminate in a Defense of Learning -- a type of performance assessment where the student draws on their body of work to present as evidence of mastery (say, once a student is ready to complete their senior year) -- the day of the defense where a student stands in front of an audience should "Ideally" not overshadow the months and years leading up to the event.  Conversely, if the day of defense is a performance assessment that consists only of a student compliantly marching through a showcase of past work ---  in the parlance of the Process/Form/Accuracy of Content criteria, the student is merely following a process, applying formulas and rules, or listing definitions  --  this "Initial" kind of performance could silently be replaced by a single slide with a bulleted inventory or a one page table of contents and not skip a beat.

From Initial to Ideal (whether it be exhibitions specifically or performance assessments in general) and from good to great is not just a straightforward journey but a non-linear learning path that may circle back and then turn forward again over time.  The secret, as it is with many things in competency-based learning, is to do the journey with as much intentionality, reflection and metacognition as possible, with the aspiration to always go deeper. 

** For further reading on Shelby County's professional development personalized learning plan led by our Staff Developer Tracy Huelsman, please read Eliot Levine's CompetencyWorks 11/4/21 blog entry profiling her work.