Breaking Boundaries
Listening our reflective practitioners
A symposium by St Ignatius College
Investigating the Effect of a Table-Top Role-Playing Game on Primary Students’ Creativity and Motivation
By
Joseph Facciol
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�1. How does playing a Table-Top Role-Playing Game affect primary students’ motivation in and outside the game?���2. How does playing a Table-Top Role-Playing Game affect primary students’ creativity in and outside the game?
Research Questions
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1. Creativity is a 21st century skill (Lee, 2019).��2. It is essentially a problem-solving process in which a person first recognizes an issue, considers solutions, tests them, and then communicates the results to others (Torrance, 1966).��3. Its constituents are:�Fluency, Elaboration, Flexibility and Originality (Ibid).
Creativity
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1. Students that seek knowledge freely are more likely to learn (Gee & Hayes, 2012).��2. It is the attribute that moves us to perform or not to perform an action (Lai, 2011).��3. Its constituents are:�Challenge, Curiosity, Control, Cooperation, Competition and Recognition (Malone & Lepper, 1987).
Motivation
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Table-Top Role-Playing Games
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1. A Pencil, a piece of paper and a d20 are all that is needed.
2. The educator writes a story.
3. The students design & play as the main characters of the story.
4. The d20 determines whether an action succeeds or fails. �
Table-Top Role-Playing Games
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A Journey Beyond – North Pole
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A Journey Beyond – Agraba & The Cave of Wonders
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A Journey Beyond – Carnival Wonderland
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A Journey Beyond – Easter Island
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A Journey Beyond – Tooth-Fairy Land
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A Journey Beyond – The Land of Giants
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A Journey Beyond – The Cathedral in the Land of Giants
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A Journey Beyond – Neighbourhood
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1. This involved a qualitative research method.���2. Two focus groups were conducted. One before the students played the game and one after they completed it. ���3. Through purposive sampling, 3 female students aged 7-9 who attended the same primary state school, were selected.��
Methodology
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3. To reduce the risk of dual-role bias, data was analyzed inductively and semantically until themes emerged. ���4. The themes were then deductively evaluated according to Torrance’s and Malone & Lepper’s definitions and taxonomies of creativity and motivation, respectively.
Methodology
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Results: Motivation
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1. After Lulu kicked the Grinch in the ground, he re-emerged. “I think it wasn’t a good idea,” she added because she thought that “he would climb up and defeat (them) by paralyzing (them) for teasing him. ��2. Yuna explained that “(Lulu) jumped on Santa’s Grotto to get past and Lenne and Dona were fairies so they, passed too. But they had to close their ears and eyes because of the music and the dancing.”
Results: Motivation
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3. Rikku agreed with her peers’ assessment. “That was a good idea when Yuna froze them all because they couldn’t attack back when they fell. (She) just took them on and put them in jail and that was easy.”��4. All students initially mentioned recognition only in so far as being feedback which helped them understand how they were performing. This, however, changed after they finished the game. ��
Results: Motivation
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1. During the penultimate session after the students unlocked the game’s final chapter, the elves cheered the their name and consequently, they cried tears of joy.��2. “Do you remember when at the end, before we went to our world, all elves cheered our names?” (Yuna).��3. “Yes! I remember I cried so much!” (Rikku)
Results: Motivation
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4. “That was a very magical moment for us.” (Lulu)��5. “I loved how they cheered for us.” (Yuna)��6. The students’ reaction seemed to imply that they valued their efforts not only within the game’s world but also beyond it.
Results: Motivation
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Results: Creativity
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1. “The Grinch was trying to cancel Christmas by concocting a potion and when Santa was about to see him, the Grinch sneakily fled. Then Santa saw the potion on the table, drank it, and fell asleep on his rocking chair.” (Lulu - Focus Group 1)��2. “If the Mad Hatter didn’t give us the hats and I didn’t transform into one of the soldiers they could have known that it was us and they could have come for me and taken my compass. Then if we lost track of the soldiers we would have been lost.” (Lulu - Focus Group 2)�
Results: Creativity
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1. “We entered Santa’s Grotto and we came across Paine. She was a young elf and she showed us a secret place which led to a secret tunnel. Then we saw someone and thought he was an elf but he was the Grinch all along!” (Yuna - Focus Group 1)���2. “He was all green and smelly… and he was really hairy!” (Rikku - Focus Group 1)�
Results: Creativity
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1. “I built an ice wall with Yuna between us and the Boogeyman. Then I said ‘Yuna! Can you bring mum and dad and help us?’ and then I took the wall down, Lulu came with her strong legs and kicked him.” (Rikku - Focus Group 2)��2. “What I did with Jafar can be applied to somebody else who is mean. We can teach them this stuff. How it feels like to be mean and how it feels like to be good then perhaps that person could become good.” (Yuna - Focus Group 2)�
Results: Creativity
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1. Overall, the findings showed an increase in both motivation and creativity except for competition with regard to motivation, which remained constant. The excerpts were marked by instances of creativity and motivation which started within the game-world and poured into the students’ lives. ��2. Since this research took a qualitative research approach and selected its participants through purposive sampling, its findings cannot be generalized.
Conclusion
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Conclusion
3. It is recommended that future studies adopt a different research approach and include middle, secondary, church or private schools, as well as male students.���TTRPGs are simple to use, are innately cross-curricular, can easily combine academic with non-academic education and have tremendous inclusive potential.
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Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.��Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. (2012). Nurturing Affinity Spaces and Game-based Learning. In C. Steinkuehler, S. Squire, & S. Barab, Games, Learning and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age (pp. 129-155). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press��Lai, E. R. (2011). Motivation: A Literature Review Research Report Motivation. http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/tmrs/Motivation_Review_final.pdf������ �
References
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Lee, S.-M. (2019). Her Story or Their own Stories? Digital Game-based Learning, Student Creativity, and Creative Writing. European Association for Computer Assigned Language Learning, 238-254��Malone, T., & Lepper, M. R. (1987). Making Learning Fun: A Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivations for Learning. Aptitude, Learning and Instruction, 223-253��Torrance, E. P. (1996). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Norms-technical manual. Princeton, N. J.: Personnel Press, Inc.� ����
References
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