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The middle school where I teach is greatly expanding it's elective offerings next year, and on a whim I pitched a Role-Playing Games class to my principal: lots of reading and high-level vocabulary; writing about characters and narrative story arcs; presentations, drama and cooperative interaction; math skills and applying formulas; working with abstract rule systems. Great stuff, right? Especially with the shift toward Common Core in the next few years.
I got an e-mail today: Sure, why not?
Bam! I'm teaching two periods of Pathfinder next year!
Now that the euphoria has worn off, I need to figure out how I'm going to do it.
I figure I'll start with a disclaimer and parent permission slip, something along the lines of "This class will teach students to think critically and problems solve through adventure gaming. Students will participate in cooperative story telling. These stories will involve about the same level of imaginary action, danger and violence as a PG or maybe PG13 movie or video game, in the spirit of popular stories like "the Hobbit," "Harry Potter," or "Pirates of the Caribbean."
We can start the first class talking about rules, in the game sense. Have everyone pick a table game - checkers, Uno, Monopoly - and try to write the rules. Maybe read the rules to a partner without revealing the name of the game. Discuss the idea of a rule set.
Then maybe watch a period worth of the Hobbit to get them in the mood for fantasy storytelling.
I'm thinking I'll use the Beginnner's Box Hero's Handbook for my textbook. It starts with a nice little solo adventure that uses dice, then some super basics of character building. For this, though, I think I'd assign them pre-gens to look at through the character creation process, at least the first time. I'll have about 24 kids, so maybe assign 6 kids to each pre-gen. After that, run through a couple of encounters where the group decides what the pre-gen should do (over the course of 6 rounds, each kid would have a chance to lead and call the actions).
My big challenge is going to be that there's only one of me and no one else who knows how to GM. Maybe just spend a day having them battle each other, or one play a pre-gen and one a random monster out of the GM's Guide (I spent hours doing this back in the days of AD&D). Then the GM's Guide has a sample adventure in a handy one-encounter-per-page format, maybe have them rotate being GM on each encounter. I can do some observations and see who's ready to GM a full adventure. Follow the Pathfinder Society model and run them through a basic adventure then have them run other kids through it.
After a few adventures with pre-gens, it'd be time to go back and create their own personal characters. In the various adventures above, they probably should have tried each of the 4 pre-gens at least once. Have them brainstorm their favorite characters from books and movies and decide which classes they fall into. Talk about archetypes and "party roles" - might be a good time to watch a little more of something, Lord of the Rings or the Avatar cartoon or Buffy or even ScoobyDo, and talk about how every character has his or her niche. Also use the random background generator from Ultimate Campaign to help them flesh out their character.
Give them a chance to play around with those for a while. Then it would be fun to do something on maps. Look at a few published adventures and compare the maps and the encounters, then have them draw a map and add traps, monsters and challenges. I can just imagine my grading rubric: "must include 1 trap, 1 puzzle, 1 thug encounter, and one boss encounter." Have them write a little boxed text and run each other through their encounters. Evaluate each other and re-write. I'd love to use the Paizo submission guidelines for PFS scenarios or maybe from the Superstar contest. (Wouldn't that be a kick? Have every kid submit something to the Superstar contest.) Maybe look at Wolfgang Baur's Kobold Guides to Writing to see if I can find some adventure templates for them to follow.
It may take some tinkering, but I feel like we can get a good balance of reading, writing, analysis of character and genre, art, cooperation and leadership skills, problem solving and fun.
Nuts and bolts-wise, I have my personal set of books. I can probably pick up an extra Beginner Box, but we'll probably mostly be working off photocopies and the PRD. I have tons of minis, but I'm not sure I'm ready to expose those to heavy use and pilferage, so I'll probably pick up a couple of Bestiary Boxes of pawns, many the NPC box too. Won't be able to swing dice for each kid (that's be 50 sets), but I can probably get a set or 2 per group - they can share. He-he, I could use dice as prizes for kids who do really well, offer boons like re-rolls for extra credit.
We're lucky - there is a convention (Strategicon) three times a year just a mile away from my school. Maybe I can take a few of the best students to an afternoon game, see if they can hang with the big kids (rules-wise), or maybe I can convince my local Venture Captain to help me organize a KidCon and round up some GMs to run my kids through an actual PFS module. Possibilities are endless.
Anyway, this has turned into me brainstorming and thinking out-loud as much as anything else. I know some other folks have run Pathfinder clubs or maybe even a class before. I'd love to hear your experiences and get your suggestions. Same with anyone who has experience teaching kids to play Pathfinder. And anyone else with ideas about how or what to teach kids about this game we obsess over, with a few academic skills thrown in to boot.
I can't remember when and where I saw it, but there was another thread on something very similar to what you're doing somewhere in the Pathfinder messageboards. Someone had taken the initiative to launch Pathfinder at the local school. If your search-fu is strong, you might be able to find that thread as it was quite a good read and had some good ideas.
I just would like to say this is awesome, and I wish that my school had done something similar growing up.
I would suggest looking to how creative writing classes are structured in regards to teaching adventure design; each must have a begging, middle, and end and so on. Also stress the importance of making the PCs the stars and the NPCs the supporting cast, not the other way around.
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I remember somebody doing an extremely similar thing on here, they even had a blog for it. Might want to search for their thread, see if he can give any help for how to run it. I remember it being a really good success for him, though!
Edit: paizo.com/threads/rzs2o4g4?Starting-a-middleschool-Pathfinder-club found it
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I can't remember when and where I saw it, but there was another thread on something very similar to what you're doing somewhere in the Pathfinder messageboards. Someone had taken the initiative to launch Pathfinder at the local school. If your search-fu is strong, you might be able to find that thread as it was quite a good read and had some good ideas.
Found the link. Hope this generates some good ideas for you:
A buddy and I always used to talk about how RPGing would be a great educational vehicle. Good luck, hope you don't get any flak from dbag parents about violence or the Satanism nonsense.
As a high school teacher of many years, I'll be watching this thread closely...
The first thing this suggests to me (as it relates to writing/critical thinking skills) is to ask the students to come up with problems and instruct each other in the tools to solve those problems. That kind of assignment can start as simply as you like and involve as many intelligences as you like, from the kinaesthetic (have students create obstacle courses in the school gym or do physical challenges like you find at summer camp) to inter- and intra-personal (reflections on LORD OF THE FLIES, which after all is a lot like the opening of "Serpent's Skull"). Build this up to designing maps and adventures, maybe even with specific goals and themes, like "wizards' college" or "fighters' guild".
Anyhoo, good luck and do report here how it goes!
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This is awesome! Although, I do see one hitch is when the kids take over as GM they may have some problems getting over the Me versus Them aspect and winning. I think you're going to need to really stress this to the kids and although a game, being a GM is more about helping others have fun, and not winning. I know far too many adults who have this problem.