Turn any unit into a massive Role Playing Game! Ready to roll?
Text Quest is a game-based pedagogy that transforms any novel study into a living, breathing educational role playing game that entire classes can play together at a time for the duration of your unit. In the realm of Text Quest, students will band together as “guilds,” think as their own period-appropriate avatars, solve asynchronous “dungeon maps,” compete against rival squads, earn precious finishers medals for high quality work products, make meaningful in-game decisions inspired by specific events from the source text, and ultimately find themselves face-to-face with an end-of-unit adversary that will test their collective powers of close reading, teamwork, writing, and communication.
If you’re an old school board game geek, think Dungeons & Dragons. If you’re a video game nerd: think World of Warcraft. And if you’ve never played either? Don’t panic! This game-inspired pedagogy functions as a “second skin” for your existing novel study, and it can be laid over any existing unit plan to help spark unprecedented levels of creativity, engagement, collaborative problem solving, and close reading of the assigned text.
All you’ll need is a few sets of:
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Role Playing Game Dice
Students will be divided into competing teams for the duration of this activity, so each class will need four identical bags of seven RPG dice, including d4, d6, d8, d10, d10 (00-90), d12, d20). Sets of five identical bags of RPG dice retail on Amazon for $9.99. Teachers wishing to expedite class gameplay by eliminating physical dice rolling can consider installing one of the many free RPG dice apps available on their smartphone.
Text Quest Lesson Flow
Each day, teams will be presented with a decision-based dice rolling scenario inspired by the assigned chapters from the novel. These warm-up activities draw inspiration from the actual events of the text itself, and are designed to foster text-to-self connections and strengthen understanding of the plot while building empathy, encouraging social strategy, and cultivating strategic gameplay as the novel unfolds.
VARIANT 1: Luck of the Dice (More Math & Strategy, Less Rhetoric & Luck)
Every day, student teams will be presented with a Warm-Up prompt scenario and the choice to pursue one of three options, ranging from “EASY” (the lie), “MEDIUM” (the stretcher), or “HARD” (the truth). Student teams will be given 1-2 minutes to strategize together as a group, after which point each group will announce their decision, and roll exactly one role playing game dice to correspond with the decision they have made. The EASY decision rolls a d8, the MEDIUM decision rolls a d12, and the HARD decision rolls a d20.
Like a traditional role-playing game, each of the three of the choices comes with a different success/defeat threshold to determine the group’s course of action. Easier choices offer lower thresholds for success (example: roll one d8 higher than 3 to succeed), while more difficult moral dilemmas offer a higher threshold for success (example: roll one d20 higher than 15 to succeed). Naturally, these choices and their respective success/defeat thresholds can escalate in difficulty as the novel progresses, offering players with greater risks that yield greater rewards as the game unfolds.
The teacher can then keep track of each team’s daily dice rolls along with their corresponding success or failure for that day’s dice roll prompt, and you can use dice roll totals each day to launch into a choice of centers activities.
AT THE END OF THE UNIT:
Multiply the total amount rolled on all the dice throughout the unit
TIMES
The total number of “successful” rolls throughout the unit where the roll cleared the designated threshold.
So as a sample…
Over the course of a six day unit, a team might roll a total of 3+4+10+12+6+1 = for a total of 36 “points” scored overall.
This number can then be multiplied by the total number of successful dice rolls (say, only days 4 and 5 were successful), so…
36 x 2 = 72 points overall.
VARIANT 2: Make a Case (More Rhetoric & Luck, Less Math & Strategy)
Every day, student teams are presented with a Warm-Up prompt scenario and the choice to pursue one of three options, ranging from “EASY” (the lie), “MEDIUM” (the stretcher), or “HARD” (the truth). Only this time: you’re not playing the odds! Rather, student teams will be given exactly 3 minutes to strategize together as a group and find as much supporting detail and text evidence as they can to make their selection.
When time expires, each group will take turns sharing their decisions, taking exactly 30 seconds each to offer any all relevant supporting evidence from the text and the rationale behind their team’s selection. Once all teams have presented, THE TEACHER WILL DECIDE which team has offered the strongest argument for the day, and award dice rolls accordingly — with the strongest argument receiving the d20, the second place argument receiving the d12, the third place argument receiving the d10, and the fourth place argument receiving the d8.
The teacher can then keep track of each team’s daily dice rolls along with their corresponding success or failure for that day’s dice roll prompt, and you can use dice roll totals each day to launch into a choice of centers activities.
For a more in-depth look at different ways to springboard from this interactive warm-up and apply Text Quest to a full unit’s lesson planning, check out any of the resources below:
- “I DO” – This is the brass tacks and motivational psychology behind the role playing game warm-up. It walks you through how and why this creative approach to lesson planning is such a powerful way to resonate with students, and offers tips on how to re-skin and re-use this same thought-provoking pedagogy for any lesson.
- “WE DO” – This post talks about the pedagogy behind one such team-vs-team approach to group work, where dice rolls flow seamlessly into the next activity and determine student tasks for the day. Then it’s time for our daily…
- “YOU DO” – A good old-fashioned Socratic Seminar, in which students incorporate everything that they had recapped from the warm up with everything their team had collected during the timed annotation in order to make clearer sense of deeper thematic analysis and more probing Higher Order Thinking questions.
- WINNING THE GAME – To the victor goes the spoils! This post is all about how you can celebrate top performers and build in a daily “Medal Ceremony” to kick each new class off with an incentive for all players to raise the bar even higher!
And if you’re feeling REALLY ambitious? Here’s my full-out Text Quest adventure through a three week unit on The Great Gatsby to show you how crazy you can get when planning these sorts of game-changing activities!