Jun 11 2019

Authors: GFRP Team

Family Engagement Game for Change  

In recent years, professional learning for educators has begun to incorporate gaming elements. Gamification involves bringing components traditionally associated with video games or board games into the learning environment. Often, this involves concepts like points accrual, competition, and rewards being integrated into activities in a safe space for failure. 

The purpose of gamification is to increase engagement by making tasks both challenging and entertaining, but also giving participants a chance to try again if they don’t immediately succeed.

In the Family Engagement Game for Change, family engagement professionals—whether they are librarians, teachers, early childhood staff, or others—are split into teams and read short “dilemma” cards (see photo below) based on real-life family engagement problems of practice. The game involves managing the dilemmas based on certain criteria and gaining points for creating the best proposed solutions. Feedback from librarians at Toronto Public Library who played the game suggest that the experience is exciting and fun, and that it promoted brainstorming, created meaningful conversation, and sparked new ideas.

 To learn more about the game and to try it out in your organization, click below.

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In the game, a player is selected to serve as the first “judge.” This player will deal each of the “players” in the group one of the 5R cards.

The judge then reads the first family engagement challenge card to the group (see the example above).

Players are invited to manage the dilemma inspired by the card they have.  Based on a criteria, the judge awards a chip to the player who "wins" the round.  The player with the most chips wins!