Abstract:

The school is supposed to be the place of excellence to learn. However, learning means much more than the acquisition of specific content in academic subjects. Assuming that the training in the school should be based on autonomy and curriculum flexibility and that significant learning requires the mobilization of diverse literacies, multiple theoretical and practical skills, promotion of scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity, critical and interventional thinking, creativity and collaborative work, this paper reports a role play experience that appeals to those competencies.

The experience consists of the interpretation of characters by students in groups of "players". Those characters advance in a fantasy adventure while actively construct a story, in an open world of possibilities, where each participant has space of decision within the limits of the reasonability allowed by the others and the contexts presented by the narrator or D-Master, according to Game Dungeons and Dragons (DnD, Gygax & Arneson, 1974). The narrator organizes the game, creates the details describing to the players what they see and hear, presents the challenges, maintaining a realistic continuity of events while controlling the development of the adventure, except in the actions of the characters.

The experience took place in a school, within the activities plan of the Student and Family Support Office, to respond to difficulties in complying with classroom rules, self-control of behavior and heterogeneity reflected in conflictual peer relationships and relations with adults.

We assumed that by participating in the game all the 24 students in the 7th grade class would be encouraged to develop and put into practice values of curiosity, reflection and innovation defensible in the light of a school culture desirable and adjusted to the adapted to the requirements of living in community. Thus, the school management agreed to promote a citizenship training by active participation in the proposed game, as is more likely to happen in non-formal contexts. With this experience, we wanted to reconcile the school “request" with the learning potential and activation of higher order cognitive processes (e.g, creative problem solving, decision making, anticipation of consequences, etc.) and non-cognitive listening attentively, acceptance of diverse opinions, involvement, empathy, ...) from a game approach and theoretical framework of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Although brief, 5-session experience was assessed by responses to the game experience questionnaire (IJsselsteijn, De Kor & Poels, 2013), with sensory immersion and imagery, self-competence perception, flow state, high recognition of acceptance, involvement and empathy, positive affects, concomitantly to the absence of feelings of tension, annoyance or discomfort. All the participants expressed pleasure at participating and that they would like to continue the experience, noting their more regulated social behavior and the interest in deepening different themes. It is concluded from the pertinence of the approach tried in a school context.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, RPG, Flow, Self-competence, Interpersonal relationships.