Westborough High school

Started with breakfast club and went on to after school club, dinner time club and interacting with pupils in lessons. First came via UFA.

Lessons started interacting with COPE and EMA and went on to include Maths and French.

Went on to work with their feeder schools and the organising of trips out of school, such as this years Expo.

A journey through a changing perspective.

Westborough High School is a specialist school for Business and Enterprise. We began our work here towards the end of 2008 after a meeting we were invited to attend of the UFA. The University of the First Age is an organization that, in their own words, creates enjoyable learning challenges that enrich lives; increasing aspiration and achievement for young people aged 5 - 25.

From this meeting I bumped into an inspirational lady called Gayna Goalby. She was a UFA organiser that worked at Westborough as their extended learning co-coordinator. She approached us with the aim of setting up a games club at their school. They had a small range of games but felt they were not made the most of.

We began by coming in on a Tuesday morning and running a games club, getting the children enthusiastic about playing new board and card games together, and using this as a platform to look at social skills etc. We put in a pack of games that, after our initial sessions, we knew worked well with the children and had a high level of participation. This club proved to be extremely popular and attendance and participation within the breakfast club increased significantly.

From here we suggested trying a classroom based exercise to show how games can be used in a much more focused way; providing a highly challenging activity that made it more likely that disenfranchised young people would engage in more enthusiastically. After speaking with the head of inclusion, the green light was given for the work to go ahead. This first group was indeed pupils that found school a real challenge and were a combination of those that struggled to focus in lessons, had less developed social skills or was at a learning age lower than was required.

When the group was assembled and told they would be playing games their initial reaction was not a good one. ‘I hate games’, ‘Games suck’ and ‘Are you a geek?’ were all comments thrown at me. In turn I laughed off each of them, agreed with the geek label but didn’t rise to any of comments or taking them too seriously. This was all part of our strategy.

This initial session was a tremendous success with all of the participants enjoying the lesson immensely, without ever realising just how much they were learning by taking part. We used more curriculum based games, tying into Math and English based learning, such as Straw, Zeus on the Loose, Apples to Apples and Word on the Street.

Several outcomes struck me immediately: -

The children loved to playing the games together, as long as someone else maintained control of the group. When left to their own devices this immediately resulted in cheating and a breakdown of the turn sequence.

( One of our targets would be to have them play the games with no supervision and to play in a fair yet competitive way. )

They loved the challenge that the game presented, having to work out the next number, the spelling of the next word or simply what their opponents were trying to do. This proved to be a big plus. It was also apparent that those who could achieve had a ‘cool’ factor within the group, a factor that others strived to achieve.

( This became another of our early goals. To maintain the ‘cool’ feel of the sessions and to show that all of the children were capable of winning and achieving this status through practice and concentration. )

Many of the games aimed at younger people, 7-11, worked just as well, if not better, with some of the older students. Their outlook/upbringing allowed them a more ‘savvy’ view when it came to the bluffing element of a game.

( Over time we took a greater and greater range of games into the school, with numerous differing winning conditions and skills and tactics required. This would show them not only how different these sorts of games could be but to challenge them in many different ways. )

This lesson and several breakfast club appearances led in turn to many sessions over the next several months, in which we returned to the school each Monday to work with groups of children, each with different goals and needs. These sessions included not only the work throughout the day but often involved returning to work during a parents evenings, transition events between schools and open evenings.

One of the first events we ran there was a primary games day in which children from the nearby cluster of schools in that area came over to Westborough for a range of activities, which included the games that we used there. Many of the children from the sessions helped to teach the children from the cluster how to play the games and teach on what they had learned. It was great to see how enthusiastically they joined in and how well the children taught the games to the younger students. It showed clearly that they had understood how the games worked and what was required to play and win the game. They had a passion for show others this new form of entertainment they had discovered and loved proving that they could run this sort of event.

Such was the success at this that before very long more and more teachers began sticking their heads into the sessions and looking to see how they could involve us in their work. Soon we were covering the following lessons, either with small groups or sometimes the entire class.

Maths

Working with small groups who were currently struggling we would play a range of games that all required a knowledge basic maths skills to do well. Starting slowly in a less competitive fashion this was built up over time to be more competitive, increasing the speed at which people needed to play and bringing in gradually more difficult and complicated games.

One of the observations of this lesson was students initial reluctance to even consider working out certain numbers. They would state ‘I don’t know, I can’t do it’. What became very obvious was that they could do it but it just took them longer than others to do it. This loss of face was not easy for them to take and so a ‘I don’t know’ and the dismissing of the calculation would hide their lack of confidence in working it out. Giving them the time to work this out, proving that they could, increased their confidence. We would never however work it out for them. I saw this on a number of occasions from teachers and support staff and the children were always happy to have it done for them. We never did this and would apply positive pressure on them to do it for themselves by making everyone else wait until they had it calculated.

‘Use your fingers, use your toes, I don’t care, you just cannot have a calculator and I’m not telling you’. Although this might seem harsh, when the pupils realised that this was the case they were happy to work it out and we never had any issues in children wanting to work out the calculations for them self.

COPE ( Certificate of Personal Effectiveness )

For those that are not aware, the aims of the qualification are to enable candidates to develop and demonstrate personal, key and employability skills leading to personal effectiveness, and to broaden experience and manage learning through the enrichment activities provided by the ASDAN challenges. The purpose of the qualification is to develop these generic skills and receive formal recognition through certification.

Working with these older students was a real pleasure. A mix of young teenagers, boys and girls, who were all more than a little cheeky but who knew how to enjoy themselves and who really embraced the work we did. Whilst struggling in a regular classroom these students were all very capable, often very intelligent. An example of this would be that many of these students would score poorly in a test against their peers who would score high ratings. Yet, pit them against these same students in a strategic game or a game that requires cunning and forward thinking, they would often win comfortably. Their intelligence needed harnessing.

We had several goals with these groups. We wanted to help some with their self confidence, often lacking due to poor results in class or personal reasons. In others it was more about the social aspect of gaming, learning to give others a say, learning to take turns fairly, cooperating with others, all things they generally found difficult..

We brought in a range of cooperation and strategy based games alongside the range of more competitive games that we used here and often split the group into small teams to work together. Blokus, Infinite City, For Sale, Incan Gold and Gem Dealer were all used to great effect. We used games that we initially thought to be overly complicated but found that several of the students thrived with these sorts of games. Take It To The Limit is a great example of this. It is a game of simple rules and mechanics but one that can be played on a number of different levels, depending upon ability.

Occasionally we would take in a couple of more physical games that were purely about laughing together and enjoying each others company, Villa Paletti and Wallamoppi real winners here, just to show the children that they could relax and enjoy each other’s company without bickering between themselves, which would often occur in other lessons.

EMA ( Ethnic Minority Achievement )

This group would often consist not only of those students who had English as a second language but often became a first port of call for any new students from overseas. Struggling with their English, these lessons focused on helping resolve that problem. Word games became the order of the day and games where we could establish teams were also important in overcoming some of the assumptions that some students had of others from different backgrounds.

The group would consist of children from the Middle East, Pakistan and India alongside others from central Europe and the Balkans. Initially the sessions were difficult, most often due to the children not wanting to speak to many of the others, but this was quickly overcome and after a time they became good friends and could often be seen speaking with each other throughout the school.

We occasionally ran tournaments in the school and several of our tournament winners came from this group. One of the girls attending spoke of a younger brother she had, who she believed would love to play the games. Upon hearing about the tournament she was so determined to win that she came to both the dinner time and after school clubs for the next couple of weeks until she had achieved the highest score for the game, becoming the highest placed student. The prize she won was to pick any game of her choice to take home which she then did and picked one specifically for her younger brother. Her hard work paid off and we could see how determined she could be when she put her mind to it. I hope she took this forward into her other classes.

Friendship Circle ( Improving Self Confidence )

One of the most rewarding groups was a selection of girls, sent to us to help improve their self confidence and social skills. The girls were very capable and clever but were extremely shy.

These sessions focused purely on games that involved the students speaking and working in teams. Both Maths, English and cooperative games were included and throughout all the games we would be constantly talking, asking questions, making jokes and creating an atmosphere in which they would feel comfortable and able to open up and discuss things.

After only a few weeks these sessions would have all the girls lined up outside, extremely eager to take part and join in. The session became louder and louder and the girls began to laugh and enjoy themselves. We began using slightly more complex and challenging games whilst maintaining the fun atmosphere and changed the teams around so that everyone had to partner everyone else at some stage.

The feedback from these girls was fantastic and keeping them calm and quiet became the next challenge! Their enthusiasm, politeness and desire to learn something new was extremely inspiring. It was not long after was begun the sessions that we can say we achieved all that had been asked of us and more. The only fear the girls had was that the sessions would not continue! I am sure this gave them the confidence they needed to improve both their studies and the belief that they could achieve their goals.

Dungeons & Dragons ( After School Activity )

We began running this club on a Monday and Tuesday evening, after school, with the aim of showcasing a very different type of game that no-one at the school had tried before. An entirely cooperative game this involved the players becoming part of a fantastic story in which they could determine what happened next.

After starting this, hoping to get a few students to try it out, we soon found that we had a large group of regulars all wanting to have a go and ran several continuous sessions for all of them.

Team work would decide whether or not they would do well and it was great to see how they realised how important this simple skill was. They quickly learned that by giving everyone a chance to speak, they often found new ideas and different solutions to problems would appear.

The children playing this game all commented that it was the best game they had ever played and the point they found most enjoyable was that interaction between themselves and their friends, solving the many problems put in front of them and determining where they would go next.

Summary

The effect games activities can have at any school can be profound. The effect it can have on behaviour, opinions, attainment and attitude have all been witnessed here. These effects can not only be seen on the children but on some of the teachers that participated in the activities with us.

The teachers could see firsthand how playing the games changed how the students behaved. Challenging the students, making them give an activity a chance rather than dismissing it is now leading them to visit game conventions across the country with other pupils from the school. Many of them visit other events we run outside of the school in different areas. The challenges within the games improve a multitude of skills, useful across a variety of subjects, as well as in life in general.

The more schools that come on board the more we will look to link schools together helping introduce children to other like minded people who just love the fun of playing a game.