Tabletop RPG Classroom: In-Game Social Studies Lesson for Middle School Kids
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- General structuring for teaching social studies with TTRPGs
- TTRPG social studies lesson for middle school kids
General structuring for teaching social studies with tabletop role-playing games
First! If you’ve already read my TTRPG chemistry lesson articles (for elementary, middle school, and high school) OR the elementary school social studies lesson post, much of this next explanation will be similar to the general structuring section in that post, and you can go here to skip ahead to the in-class example (the new part)!
Before we get to the example, we’re going to cover some general tips for structuring your game around a lesson or educational goal. Much of this will be similar to any subject that you’re teaching (not just for social studies lessons and not just for middle school kids). This means that if you’re here looking for general TTRPG classroom info, much of this can be applicable to any class, after school group, or game!
I’m covering this all before the middle school TTRPG example because it is important to understand the basics for how the example is structured and why we’re doing things the way we are (so that you can take this material and extrapolate it for your particular kids and lessons).
Setting your game’s educational goal(s)
When it comes to setting up intentionally educational TTRPGs, before you start coming up with plots and mechanics and even educational content, you first need to figure out what your goals for your students are since this is going to be what we want to build everything else around.
You don’t want to be trying to shoehorn a concept into an existing game or story idea that doesn’t really fit… and then losing the focus on what you want to teach.
Pick one to two core goals that you hope to accomplish with the tabletop RPG that you’re introducing to your class. What is the purpose of introducing this game?
For social studies classes with middle school kids, these concepts could be something like “understand cause and effect within historical context” or “take perspectives for different individuals” or “identify key events in a historical sequence” or “conduct short research essay on key historical figure”. There’s a range here with topics being purely academic to topics that focus on general big picture concepts that will build a foundation for future lessons, so think about your situation and pick a couple that work for your group and that you think could be helped by working into a TTRPG.
Paying attention to your game’s focus
Next, once you have your goal to build from, you’re probably going to start thinking of the game system that you’ll use and the story that you’ll make to surround the topic(s) you chose.
As you do this, make sure to keep the focus on teaching your goal.
If you pick a complex game system that takes several weeks to learn, you could be diverting your students’ focus and time from the core goal (learning social studies) and instead putting it on learning about this particular game system… which is not your goal.
For some subjects (like in this interview with D&D teacher Kade Wells), systems like D&D can be great for teaching English and reading because they require critical reading skills to understand, and it provides necessary motivation, so that system meets the goals of the class. I also show how, if the group knows D&D off the bat, it can be a very good medium for teaching classes as well, like in my middle school chemistry lesson post that uses D&D.
However, a lot of cases aren’t going to work the best with this, so I recommend to consider your situation and choose what works for you. In this example, I choose a game system (d12go) that is easy to learn so it gives space for students focus on learning the social studies class goal that you set. This could mean just using a 1d6 system (like this example for elementary chemistry classes) or drawing cards from a deck of standard playing cards for randomization, and that’s OK. You can also go full story mode as well (like this high school chem class example… and what we’ll do here too). This one below will use a d12 based system that was intended to be an easy first system to learn.
When you’re creating your adventure, watch the story as well. Keep your lesson modular (you probably don’t have time to get into a ton of lore and still keep it within a typical class period), so run quick one-shots or have a few short sessions spread out over a few classes… then end there. It doesn’t need to be a full epic campaign to get your educational goals across, and you want students focusing more on the educational concepts anyway. If you want to connect lessons, I recommend having a game that you can jump in and out of with each chapter or section you cover, so you have the flexibility to play the game with your class and also complete any necessary lesson plan requirements.
Include multiple points of contact with the subject material in your TTRPG
If you look at stories ranging from fairy tales to present day children’s tv shows, when a new concept is being taught, it’s often presented at least three times (think of how The Boy Who Cried Wolf repeated its theme or how Bluey reiterates topics throughout the episode).
This is because we need to interact with something more than once for it to sink in. When teaching, you should also reiterate some of the topics a few times to make sure they stick and students have had enough time to process and absorb the material.
When you look at the example below, watch for multiple points of contact and how they drive the core goal home over and over. Also, watch how they progress from taking map directions from a start point to finding a random map symbol to puzzling out a location based on clues.
Build your social studies class examples into each other and the TTRPG
With those multiple points of contact, you’ll also want to make sure that they are both built into each other (so they’re related and connected) and that they’re part of the story and/or mechanics that you have included in your tabletop RPG.
Tying them tightly into the game creates the connection that you’re looking for between your players and the material, and it’s the whole point of doing this! So, make sure that your story and your lessons match!
Now, this all can seem like a lot to watch out for, but it’s really a few very simple points:
- Determine your educational goal
- Keep your mechanics and story simple and focused on the goal
- Use your goal at least three times
- Connect your game ideas to the goal
To help show how to do this specifically for middle school kids, here’s an example lesson that teaches about timelines, cause and effect, and a key historical figure.
Example TTRPG social studies lesson for middle school kids (<8)
Goals, context, and mechanics for your elementary school TTRPG social studies lesson
Context: Once per chapter, end of section special event for the class to have an in-class TTRPG adventure after reading. Time limit of 60 minutes (one full lesson period).
Goals: (1) Identify and interpret events between historical sequence timelines, (2) interpret and predict cause and effect of key historical moments, and (3) discuss the perspective of a key historical figure.
Mechanics: d12go (rules lite, d12 based indie TTRPG system) – see review here for mechanics details
Lesson(s): Time travel to stop Timey Tim from siphoning chronal energy off of Jane Goodall by locating where she has gone missing in the timeline and helping her to get back into the correct time and place.
First point of contact: Session 0 and your recruitment!
In this example, our first point of contact with our goal is going to be during the introduction to our story and will take place after characters are made. With this frame, students will make a character during the first session and then keep that character througout subsequent adventures from chapter to chapter, so the session 0 portion will only need to be done once per school year.
For this game’s story, we’re going to tell students that they have been recruited by a time traveler, Professor “When”dy! The Professor (played by you, the teacher) has been tracking their archnemisis, Timey Tim, as he has trounced through time, siphoning off chronal energy and totally messing with the timeline!
After Professor “When”dy’s last encounter with Timey Tim, they were framed for a Butterfly Effect Cascade Event that got them their Time Diving License revoked, so now they can only operate from back in the HQ… which is why you were all recruited from across time and space! You’ll be given various missions and need to identify the source of the disruption, dive into time, and find and stop Timey Tim! Multiple teams will be sent in on parallel timelines, and at least one of you must succeed to set things right! But be careful… Timey Tim is a wiley one and has always seemed to somehow slip away at the last moment…
Session 0 (conducted for the first game session only, unless you want to reiterate each lesson): You’ll now cover some ground rules and safety tools (I recommend checking out this post and this guide). Students will now need to make their character. Their character can be from any time period that you plan to cover during the school year and they will need to answer the following questions about this character:
- What era are you from?
- What was your profession?
- Why were you recruited? What special skill do you have?
- Between lessons, write 2-3 sentences about your character’s life to earn a bonus re-roll
These questions help with incentivising a student to get particularly interested in a specific time period and encourages them to conduct a bit of research between lessons, slowly building a research paper on life in that time over the course of the year (which could be a foundation for a great end-of-year project where they dress up as their character and present). It helps with perspective-taking and can be quite and immersive learning experience.
Session 1 (find your first temporal instability): Professor “When”dy has detected a distrubance that’s caused significant impacts to developments in medicine and science. Check out the sequence here and find what’s off by comparing this to your notes and text book!
Give students the timeline with the asterisks and ask them to find the issues with the timeline and who is missing. They should find that Marie Curie is missing… she should have discovered radium and recieved two nobel peace prizes. This has a potential impact on future events, like advances in medicine and in women’s rights and representation in sciences. This exercise helps students to research events, use a historical timeline, and see cause and effect impacts.
*1905 – Henri Bequerel and Pierre Curie recieve a split Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in radioactivity shortly before they both die in the next few years
*1920 – The first text book describing treatment of cancer using radiation is published
*1965 – Maria Goeppert Mayer becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics
The timeline should be:
1903 – Henri Baquerel and the team of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie jointly win the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in radioactivity; Marie Curie is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in any field
1903 – Marie Curie becomes the first woman in France to earn a PhD in Physics
1904 – The first text book describing treatment of cancer using radiation is published
1911 – Marie Curie wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing a method for measuring radioactivity, making her the first and only woman to date (2024) to win two Nobel Prizes
1963 – Maria Goeppert Mayer becomes the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics
Once students find that Marie Curie is missing, the mission is clear!
Oh no! Timey Tim must be siphoning energy from Marie Curie! Go to 1903 and STOP TIMEY TIM!
Second point of contact: Find Marie Curie!
You must now dive into the correct time and place to search for Timey Tim and Marie Curie!
Answer the following questions to make sure you don’t get lost in the time stream!
- When did Marie Curie conduct her research? (early 1900s)
- Where did Marie Curie study? (Paris)
- Who else was with her who could help find her? (Pierre Curie and Henri Bequerel)
Split the class into teams of 3-5 so they can come up with a plan for where and when to go. Describe how they jump through time to the time and location above, then circulate around the classroom to answer some of their questions in character as Pierre Curie and Henri Bequerel at a research lab in Paris. These are the points you could hit to help with perspective taking and immersion in the game:
- Marie was missing this morning; Pierre thought she may have come to the lab early and Henri has not seen her here all day.
- Marie’s notes are also missing, and they contain her research on several points that the trio has been hitting a roadblock on.
- They suspect someone may be trying to steal their research or that some members of the university and the French Academy of Sciences, who did not believe that a woman could be competent in the sciences, were behind this.
- If they believe that you are there to help, Henri may tell players that he found an odd device in the lab that wasn’t there before, and that he hasn’t been able to figure out. It’s giving off something akin to the energy they are researching, but still very different. Pierre will take a look and come to a similar conclusion before he leaves to contact the police and to search on his own some more.
You recognize the device as a small piece from a personal temporal space time pocket generator, and it’s giving off a mild temporal energy signal. Professor “When”dy can tune into the signal’s specific frequency from the device fragment and transport you to a pocket dimension where Timey Tim is holding Marie Curie!
Third point of contact: Battle Timey Tim, talk to Marie Curie, and see the impact
You find Marie Curie actively telling off Timey Tim and largely holding her own, however, Timey Tim is also using a device to pull energy from the air around Marie Curie. Now, it is your students’ characters’ time to shine! Battle Timey Tim!
Give students a stat sheet for Timey Tim and roll for his moves, then allow each group of students to roll according to the rules of d12go until he’s defeated or your moves as Timey Tim knock the group out!
If at least one group in the class defeats Timey Tim, Timey Tim will let loose a burst of temporal energy he stole from Marie Curie in order to escape with a flare from his malfunctioning generator at the last moment, cackling all the while, as the energy whooshes back to Marie Curie.
Marie Curie will then thank the group for the assist and insist that she must get back home immediately to let her colleagues know she is alright and to share the massive breakthrough she hit last night (it is a game changer!). She doesn’t know who you are or your exact motives, but she appreciates your help. She will leave the bubble if the group hits the button on the device to collapse the time pocket OR she can push her own way through the wall to return home.
At this point, you can describe to the students how they watch time pass quickly before them as they are pulled back to the Professor’s HQ. They see Marie Curie reuiniting with her partner and colleagues before pulling out her notes and writing, rapidly, across a chalk board as Pierre and Henri take it in… then they throw thier hands up and all begin discussing, pointing, and talking excitedly. It flashes to the Nobel Prize nomination announcement in 1903 and Pierre Curie going in to fight to put Marie’s name on the award as an equal to his an Henri’s. It shows Marie continuing her research after both Pierre and Henri passed away and her going on to win another Nobel Prize, this time on her own, years later. It blinks again to a young woman reading about Marie Curie and then flashed forward to her winning the Nobel Prize herself as an adult. And then it expands out, showing threads of light bursting forth and touching the lives of millions of people recieiving medical treatment from Marie’s research and branches then into their loved ones and their accomplishments and their saved lives.
As the story closes, congratulate your students as Professor “When”dy and then ask them what they think about Marie Curie’s life and the impact that she had. Talk about how the actions of one person can have a larger impact and ask if your students have any questions.
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What’s shown here can be modified to fit your class and other types of lessons and other historical figures, and it’s meant to be a springboard for other ideas. There’s tons of variations on this one example too – you could have stories about different historical figures or focus on events, you could give a bonus if an event is in one of the player character’s time periods, you could require a short written assignment (about 1 paragraph or so) after the game to have a gradable measure for curriculum requirements. Get creative and see what works for your class and your requirements!
I hope it helps to show a sample tabletop RPG lesson outline for either direct use in your classes or to spark some inspiration for other ideas, and let me know in the comments if you use this or have ideas of your own!
Stay tuned for future lessons as well – the next “Tabletop RPG Classroom” article, which will cover a high school social studies lesson with a different system and subject to help round out the examples and show how it can be scaled to fit the needs of older students.
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