Gaming our Way to the 21st Century |

Reuven Margrett teaches at the Frankel Jewish Academy (Detroit, MI), where he coordinates the minyan program and has directed the technology professional development program. Currently he is leading a team developing technologies involving gaming to help teach Rabbinic texts.

Reuven Margarett describes a gaming app his school is developing to engage students in classical Jewish issues and texts.

Education is not a game, nor is being Jewish in the 21st century. The foundation of our ennobling religion demands that we make every effort to make our texts and traditions relevant to a generation saturated with media mediocrity and ephemeral triviality. Our mission as Jewish educators is to elevate and inspire our children, to give them the tools to access our wisdom filled repositories, and to absorb and integrate our spiritual wealth into their lives.

At first glance the notion of a frivolous game may be anathema to the very notion of a deep and enriching encounter with Jewish texts, one of our most sacred of missions. Yet the very impact of games – absorption, commitment, motivation, challenge, participation and failure, may help us towards our broader goal of creating knowledgeable and skillful learners. The elements of gaming could prove to be a useful tool. Many have experienced that when the review takes the form of Jeopardy that students are more keen to share their knowledge, and to take risks. At the end of my last semester when I borrowed the quiz bowl buzzers the classroom was ablaze with Jewish learning (and buzzing). If an enduring model that can encapsulate and elongate that excitement, and produce a deep and richer Jewish learning experience, then it behooves us to use it.

To this end our school has experimented with what this model could look like. With a generous grant last year we began exploring the interplay of gaming and the learning of Rabbinical texts – a term that we call tradigitalism. Unlike most entertainment games that have no enduring knowledge goals, a Rabbinics game would be grounded in the curricula needs of the schools and help to enhance, deepen and enrich the learning goals. Minimally, if the positive elements of gaming can be harnessed to improve the learning outcomes then we will have a useful tool in our digital tool-kit. Maximally we could start to re-imagine what a learning environment in the 21st century would look like. (Schools such as Quest to Learn in NY, and GameMaker in LA are starting to do this).

Why would a school be based around the principles of gaming? One powerful idea is explained by the Institute of Play (which created the Quest to Learn school):

There are other attributes of games that facilitate learning. One of these is the state of being known as play. Much of the activity of play consists in failing to reach the goal established by a game’s rules. And yet players rarely experience this failure as an obstacle to trying again and again, as they work toward mastery. There is something in play that gives players permission to take risks considered outlandish or impossible in “real life.” There is something in play that activates the tenacity and persistence required for effective learning.

Students can engage with text, play with text, and not feel like they are failing when they get the translation wrong, or misremember facts and figures. A well-constructed game would give them the space to explore, interpret and create, and feel ownership of their own accomplishments.

Blended gaming

The pedagogy that we are using to describe how a game, and gaming mechanics may be used in class, is called blended gaming. Blended gaming has students learning both through the game, and in a class. The teacher can use various parts, elements, and dialogues in the game as a springboard for further learning of the text itself, ideas in the text, and bigger themes and values. The game allows for many such connections and enables teachers in different classes and different schools to adapt and modify the learning to focus on the areas and issues relevant to them. The learning will become more generative, based in Jewish text and tradition, but being able to bridge from the ancient world to the modern world in a compelling way. With a skilled teacher the students will not only experience playing a story based game, but actually see themselves in the continuum of the unfolding Jewish story.

In blended gaming the game is not a standalone tool. Key to its success is the teacher being aware of how to integrate the game effectively into the classroom. We need to develop the nexus between traditional curricula materials and gaming – this is a new paradigm.

What would such a game look like?

Our pilot game was called Sparks of Eternity Episode 1: Breakthrough, that aimed to enhance the learning of the opening unit of our Rabbinics I course that focusses on the Oral Torah. The course surveys the six different orders/sections of the Mishnah looking at small pieces of text from each. The first unit and text studied in depth is the very opening of the Mishnah that deals with the Shema prayer. When thinking about how to integrate the text into a game, we looked towards our tradition to find a suitable meaningful story to situate the game. The time of the Mishnaic (tannaitic) period, around 0-220 CE, is the major time of transformation from a Temple based, to a non-Temple based religion.

The first episode of our game takes place with helping Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai to escape from Jerusalem and meet Vespasian as well as saving the parts of the Oral Torah related to the Shema. The player explores the various landscapes (Temple courtyard, upper market, lower market etc) meeting different Rabbis and people who help him on the quest of saving the Oral Torah, and smuggling out Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. The player interacts with characters through various dialogues and has choices of how to respond. Based on the responses, the dialogue and the consequences in the game change. The culmination of working through the game is smuggling Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai out and meeting with General Vespasian. The game includes a glossary of all the key words, and if a key term is not understood (e.g., Torah she be’al peh), when tapped the explanation is given.

The game opens with an audio narrative that sets the scene of the quest to save the Oral Torah and escape Jerusalem. The player (talmid) properly begins with Rabban Yohanan explaining the details of the quests and what to do. The student has to explore various parts of Jerusalem to find Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer. Through a series of dialogues the student needs to demonstrate that s/he has the requisite knowledge and is capable of receiving the oral traditions from these Rabbis. Running alongside this is the quest to arrange a meeting with Abba Sikra, leader of the biryonim (zealots). There are other minor quests such as stopping the storehouses being burnt by the biryonim, and helping a young boy amidst all of the turmoil that are triggered throughout the game. The aim is to give the student a little taste of the historical events that led the eventual redaction of the Mishnah.

The elements/plots of this episode are listed below along with their pedagogic value:

A) The game taking place during the destruction of the second Temple.

Students get the context of how/why the oral Torah became recorded. Students learn more, and empathize with, key stories in Jewish history.
Students are exposed to Talmudic ‘story-like’ texts increasing their breadth of exposure to a variety of sources.

C) Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai meeting with Abba Sikra, the head of the zealots.

Students getting to know important Jewish personalities.
Students engaging with the dilemmas of whether to fight, or appease, and understanding that Jewish history is nuanced and complex (and not black and white).
Students making connections that span Jewish history, e.g., how is the scenario the Jews faced with the destruction on the second Temple, similar/dissimilar to 20th century Jewish history? How are the factions in Israel back then similar to the factions in Israel now?

E) The player having to collect parts of the Oral Torah which deal with the Shema
F)

Students get to interact with the people/opinions in the Mishnah (i.e. Rabbi Eliezer, Rabban Gamliel).
Students get a broader appreciation of diverging opinions and understanding them.
Multiple exposures of having the text explained (through the game and in class).
Students being exposed to a bottom-up model of learning a Mishnah text, rather than a top down model, i.e., students are exposed to the individual character and their opinions, and create the text of the Mishnah from them, rather than being given the Mishnah text and breaking them down.

G) Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai meeting with Vespasian

Students can relive the dilemmas that Jewish leaders face – should Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai have asked for Jerusalem to be saved, rather than asking for the town of Yavneh and its Sages?
Students consider what is essential to the survival of the Jewish people.

There are also additional benefits of the gaming style being used. Students will be more motivated to learn as they need to complete challenges to get further in the game. The game allows for self-paced learning. Students can repeat dialogues with characters if needed. Characters ask the player if they would like the ideas explained in an alternative way. The player is involved in exploratory learning by giving them the freedom to move around the city of Jerusalem, interacting with Rabbis, and the ordinary folk. The game becomes a springboard for enriched classroom discussion: Why did you choose to be on the side of the zealots and fight, or the Rabbis and make peace? Evaluate Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s conversation with Vespasian. What would you have done differently? It allows Jewish history to come alive through role-play and interacting with Jewish figures giving added reality and depth to their learning i.e. Rabbi Eliezer is not just a name on a page, but a real person who was alive at the time of the destruction of the 2nd Temple and was steeped in Jewish learning.

The results

The game was piloted in our school, and these are some of the comments the students made:

I thought the game was pretty cool. You open it up and you hear this serious backstory and it’s pretty intense.
I felt like I was actually there.
I really like this game it is fun and interacting.
It was intense but in a good way. The intro story and the background music really got me pumped to play this game! I really like how you get missions from the main rabbi and you can walk around the city and basically live in the virtual Jewish world at the time before the Mishnah!!! I think it can teach me a lot about how people acted at that time.
I loved that you get to choose how to view the importance of Torah and its purpose. Great game! I definitely know that, even when I had an objective to complete, I stuck around and talked to people so that I could understand what was happening and how it affected the people.

From an educator’s point of view it is clear that we still have a lot to learn. As a child taking a brave new first step often stumbles and totters, so too this project has been an immense learning experience. More focus needs to be paid to the game mechanics and how the students interact not only in the game but with each other. We need to look at how the gaming experience can be more challenging and clear for players.

The future…

We are currently refining and polishing up our pilot game, and hope to partner with other schools and educators who want to play a little with this idea of gaming. We are also looking at how we use game mechanics to create a longer lasting game experience that is flexible enough to meet the needs of a broad range of schools, and not just those that have the same curricula goals as ours.