Re-designing the broken game of school: Teaching with Luna Uni, a classroom-ready, standards-aligned RPG

"Gamification" is a silly idea - school already is a game, but badly designed for the players: students. In this session, Michael Low (a curriculum and game designer and 20 year classroom teacher) will describe how he's been re-building with Luna Uni, a classroom-ready, academic mastery-focused RPG that's being used to teach ELA and hit Common Core and 21st Century learning standards in two 5th grade classrooms, with plans for both implementation and impact studies in the coming year (we're looking for playtest teachers!). He;'ll be joined by Tyler Pelletier and Thomas Charltray, who are teaching using the method and seeing spectacular results.

We'll discuss how character sheets teach literary analysis and double as outlines for essays, how live game sessions are structured to teach the 4 Act East Asian Cinema approach to plot, and how "story points" teach self-reflection on growth and allow for targeted differentiation by teachers. Finally, we'll show how a truly narrative and collaborative approach breaks "win/lose" mentalities and lets students build trusting, genuine collaborative bonds, including a communal "affinity space" in their Google Slides-based novellas that fosters peer-rewarded joy in writing, reading, and telling tales together.

School may be a badly designed game, and most games aren't designed for school - but it doesn't have to be that way!

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how narrative-oriented character sheets allow for both quick character generation and help scaffold to authorial understanding of character identity and role.
• Understand and be able to use the 4 act East Asian narrative arc structure to build "live" scenes which help students build an authorial understanding of plot.
• Understand and be able to explain why and how the mechanical structure of a story game can impede or aid learning objectives (design FOR learning > USE for learning).
• Understand the use of Google Slides to help create an "affinity space" that is built by and for players.