Episode 100 Stefan McNinch from UnBoxEd
Stefan McNinch from UnBoxEd
Episode Summary
In this episode, Dave Eng speaks with Stefan McNinch, a former elementary education teacher turned game designer who founded UnBoxEd, a nonprofit program using board games to engage low-income students in social-emotional learning, history, STEM, and entrepreneurship. Stefan shares his experience using games-based learning, including RPGs, to empower students to take ownership of their education and explore their identities through character development. He discusses the challenges of dealing with diverse student personalities and the importance of understanding individual experiences to create effective learning experiences. The episode emphasizes the value of personalized learning and using player types to enhance classroom management and behavioral learning.
Stefan McNinch
he/him/his
Game Designer and Game-Based Educator, UnboxEd
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanmcninch/
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/UnboxEdClassroom/
(Website): https://www.unboxedclassroom.com
Stefan began his career as an elementary teacher, during which he ran an increasingly popular Dungeons & Dragons tutoring and mentoring club. He later returned to school himself to study game design and development, combining his passions to found UnboxEd in 2021. UnboxEd is a nonprofit afterschool program that uses board games and RPGs to engage low-income students in the subjects of Social Emotional Learning, History, STEM and Entrepreneurship. Stefan has partnered with Wizards of the Coast, the International Literacy Association, the Games-Based Learning Alliance, and the Texas A&M Bush School to promote Social-Emotional Learning through games as well as advancing the research on game-based learning in elementary classrooms. You can listen to his previous appearances on DragonTalk, Mat&Board and What I Want to Know podcasts.
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP. Find out more at www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode, we'll learn from Stefan McNinch. Stefan is a former elementary education teacher turned game designer. He founded UnBoxEd, a nonprofit program using board games to engage low income students in social-emotional learning, history, STEM, and entrepreneurship. Stefan has partnered with influential organizations as he promotes games-based learning and research on social-emotional learning in classrooms. Stefan, welcome to the show.
Stefan McNinch:
Thanks, Dave. It's an honor to have been invited.
Dave Eng:
Great. I want to start off with talking about your background in elementary education and specifically Dungeons & Dragons. This is a really interesting background. I know that there are a lot of people interested in using games-based learning that are coming from the K through 12 sphere. So as someone who has come out of elementary education, can you share more about how your background as a teacher and your passion for Dungeons & Dragons led you to found UnBoxEd?
Stefan McNinch:
Absolutely. It's a non-linear story. I was an elementary special ed educator for seven years, and after a few years, a few fifth-graders approached me to sponsor an afterschool D&D club, and I jumped to the idea. I've always been a gamer, loved RPGs growing up, never actually played D&D, but peripherally a lot of friends had. And I thought this would be a great intro for me as well.
Very quickly I took over as DM. We'd started to rotate, but as I found out very quickly, fifth-graders don't quite have the cognitive awareness to create a robust, rich campaign. So I took over as DM, which really played into my creative writing major itch as well.
After the first year, a lot of the students had graduated, and as a special ed teacher, a lot of the students that I had on a day-to-day basis found out about the club. Within a couple of years, 50% of the new club was special ed students. I recognized at that point that it was now an opportunity to create more of a tutoring and mentorship club within the program.
Full cycle, there was a five-year gap where I left education after seven years, got into publishing. And then during the pandemic I went back to school to learn more about game design and development. Founded UnBoxEd as a nonprofit. One of our first hires was actually one of my original fifth-graders that was now a 20-year-old nursing student, and we hired him under the program as one of our first instructors.
Dave Eng:
Wow. That's super interesting. I think that when I've talked to other educators, particularly in elementary education, the go-to resource seems to be Dungeons & Dragons. I know that there's a reference to Pathfinder now, but it seems that from an educational standpoint, the role of the D&D is someone that is part educator, part instructor, but also part facilitator, but like a tabletop role playing campaign, I think the meat of it is really in the interactions right between the players. And you as a DM is more of a facilitator in general for the story and for the world. I think that has a lot of educational references. Would you say that that is similar to how you've used it in the past as well?
Stefan McNinch:
Very true. There's a lot of iteration as a DM with younger students. Firstly in that there's just a lot of mechanisms that you have to sacrifice. I actually learned D&D by making it up with the students. I've never actually read a rule book for D&D.
Dave Eng:
Oh, I see.
Stefan McNinch:
They were more experienced in the lore and the rules themselves. And so I ended up learning D&D through the avenue of modifying it in a way that was more accessible to that age group. Continually, that's what we've been doing for the last two years at UnBoxEd is, I've now gone through at least 35 different RPGs and consolidated them into our own version of a kid-friendly, social-emotional learning friendly, accessible, educational sort of RPG that we're continuing to hone and hopefully soon even putting out our own product that is specifically designed within for elementary students.
Dave Eng:
Great. Well, I am interested in learning more about UnBoxEd, and I wanted to save that for the next question I have up on here, which is applied games-based learning with UnBoxEd. So can you tell us and describe how UnBoxEd uses games-based learning to engage low income students in social-emotional learning, history, STEM, and entrepreneurship? I'm most interested in learning about that.
Stefan McNinch:
Sure. Broadly it is using board games, existing board games and RPGs. We like to call it our triple A philosophy, which stands for agency, abstractions, and additive feedback, agency being allowing the kids more of a sense of ownership over their education, their mental explorations, what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.
We think of it as figuring out how they each respond and receive the mechanisms within the game to turn it from a game to my game. And RPGs are most useful in that sense of freedom and creating agency and autonomy, and that lends itself really well to entrepreneurship. In our entrepreneurship module, we start from scratch and we have the group of kids start their own business. We take all of their ideas, we distill it down, we give them some structure. We've now created a module that has some mini-games in there as well as more step step guides.
And now we're getting some really neat data that as we kind of pull them through this startup process, we'll survey them beginning, middle, and end of how many different sorts of career readiness economic concepts, and we'll measure them from beginning to end. It's about a 100% increase in the number of concepts, career readiness, and sense of agency they feel from beginning to end in terms of how much they own that process.
And then abstraction is kind of creating a safe buffer and environment where kids can explore their sense of identity. We have some students who are even in a very awkward explorative gender phase, and we noticed that RPG is a really great playground where they can, through character development, through group collaboration and group dynamics, can start to experiment with some of these pretty heavy social-emotional social conflicts.
They can do their own sort of play testing within these worlds and have that emotional buffer that it's not quite the real world. They don't have to deal with those same consequences, yet at the same time, they can train themselves that when those conflicts and those consequences come up, their characters can actually go through them in a safer, less risky way that they can then transfer that to the real world knowledge.
And then the last one is additive feedback. That's basically kind of turning the school model on its head. Instead of reductive taking away points with games, you start at ground zero and you build your way up. And so you collect resources, you collect skills, you collect points, you collect tokens and currencies.
That really allows a student going back to agency as well to focus on what they want their strengths to be, which strength they want to identify them. Are they going to be the strong one, are they going to be the smart one, are they going to be the fast one? Are they going to be the magic user? And so that really gives them a sense of ownership over their skills and an identity and a confidence that they can align with power, kind of the min-maxing path.
And then they can also then, because the weaknesses that creates have to rely on other members in the group who are strong where they are weak. So that creates a very collaborative bond where everyone is relying on each other, but everyone also excels at certain things that can give them a lot of confidence.
Dave Eng:
Wow. Super interesting. Stefan, I think that the things that resonated a lot with me is the prospect of agency, particularly with players. I know that from an educational standpoint, it's often useful to provide our learners with the option and choices to make within a learning path. I think games provide a lot of agency here.
But I think the particular aspect that really resonated with me was working with students that are really discovering their gender for the first time and being able to experience that through characters in the game. I think that with basically any game, there are representations of those players in the game or on the screen that we recognize as avatars or components or pawns or anything else.
But being able to explore these different aspects, using that component in the game as an avatar, as a representation, I think provides a really great application of games-based learning and is really fungible aspect. Going back to what we talked about before about the dungeon master being able to shape and form this quote, unquote "game world" in the realm of what is in the student's experience, what is their agency. And also particularly you as a game master for someone to shepherd them and facilitate the way through, I think is an excellent aspect of games-based learning.
Stefan McNinch:
Precisely. And we've got the kids exactly the developmental age where they are starting to grow into their independence. They're starting to see the flaws and vulnerability in adults and understand that adults don't know everything, don't have all the answers, and they're starting to see the chinks in our armor as they develop their own armor. So it's a really ripe developmental stage to start getting them into these sorts of exploratory mindsets.
Dave Eng:
All right. Thank you, Stefan. I want to move on to the last question here. This is particularly important because I know a lot of people that listen to the show are considering using games for teaching and learning in education right now. So here I'd like to talk about games-based learning strategies and UnBoxEd. Have you encountered any major surprises or false assumptions in your experience so far? And if you have, how has that informed the direction of UnBoxEd going forward?
Stefan McNinch:
Yeah, the two big ones that come to mind that we experienced very early on was one, that all kids are going to love games, which is just patently false. That was a huge assumption that we went into it.
Within our first two or three weeks, we had a student who is, I think problematically referred to as griefers, or I guess is one of his player types, but a student who, because he had been potentially raised or deals with a lot of day-to-day negative attention, when he encounters a game situation, his quickest path to self-efficacy was to ruin the game for everybody.
He was very clever, and so he found a lot of ways to ruin the game, and it broke down very quickly because there's definitely a cooperative atmosphere with games. Whether they're competitive or whether they're cooperative, there is that magic circle that everybody has to participate. So he found a lot of different ways to deconstruct that magic circle.
The assumption that all kids love games, which is leading now to a lot more research into player types and applying player types, be it socializers, philanthropists, explorers, achievers, and using that in an educational classroom setting.
There's certain aspects of personalized learning that focus on strengths and needs of the students, but really interested in working on research into how player types and what engages students mechanically can feed into a classroom management, behavioral management, and personalized learning into how do you reach the student on a foundational level into accessing them the way that they want to learn and how they learn and how they receive information? That was a big assumption that got busted that we're working to benefit.
And then the second one is that all kids are curious and imaginative or that it's a natural instinct for them, which got busted predominantly because of the pandemic. So you think about a low income setting where there are far fewer books in the home, and screen time is about an hour and a half longer per day in a low income household than in a higher economic household. And you have two years where they potentially didn't read any books.
This is at a developmental age from first to third grade where that is the primary literacy age. So you now have a third, fourth, fifth grader whose literacy is extremely low. When you think about imagination and curiosity and how those mental exercises generally come from literacy and reading and visualizing and imagining things that aren't there through the prompts of reading books.
And so that's one thing we ran into very quickly as well, is how much literacy affects curiosity, imagination. They are not natural innate things. And so we are now looking into some research about how do you identify curiosity, imagination, and creativity? Are they different muscles? Are they part of the same muscles, different branches of the same muscle?
How do you identify them? How do you reward them? How do you identify the ways that you can give appropriate feedback for each one? Is there ways to prime them through different warmup activities or different mechanisms and games that prime each one of those either separately or collectively? And how those, again, might apply to a wider educational context.
One of the biggest rewards and successes we've had this semester was during our entrepreneurship model, one of the groups was creating a car manufacturing company, and they wanted to add a feature to the cars where they invented rockets. In the middle of figuring out how we're going to put rockets on our cars, one of the kids looked up and said, "Can we research how rockets work?"
As an educator for an elementary student, like a third-grader, to actually want to look into the physics of how rockets work, I don't know how far we would've gotten, but that was a huge success for them to just demand that sort of learning was a huge success. So curiosity, imagination, creativity are definitely a path forward and based on assumptions that were just crushed.
Dave Eng:
Wow, super, Stefan. So many things that I want to talk about here, one of them being the prospect of griefing. I know we had discussed this before, but particularly in a format where you really need the structure of the game to work well. Griefers can really throw a wrench into that, but I think that understanding the backgrounds and individual experiences of students is critically important. In this case, you explained about why that particular student was griefing.
Second aspect is player types. I know that we had discussed this before, particularly like Bartle's player taxonomy with socializers, explorers, killers, and achievers. I know that it's been iterated on since then, and there's some aspects of player types that can be applied for games for learning. And I think that understanding, again, the backgrounds and experiences of individual students is going to be useful for applying games-based learning.
But also the aspect that you brought up before about students wanting to learn more specifically about a different knowledge domain or something else that may not be related to the individual game or content that you're covering is a great moment I think for any educator. For any students that have this now new, novel intrinsic motivation to want to learn more about a specific topic, I think is probably the greatest reward that any educator could get. So I'm glad you're able to share all those experiences, Stefan.
All right. So Stefan, thanks for joining us today. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Stefan McNinch:
I'm on LinkedIn, first and last name. We also have a Facebook page, UnBoxEd Classroom, as well as our website, www.unboxedclassroom.com
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Stefan. Those links will also be shared in the show notes for this particular episode.
Everyone, I hope you found this episode was useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to our references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us.
Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing, and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you.
I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. I live to lift others with learning. So if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit. Also, make sure to visit University XP online at www.universityxp.com University XP is also on Twitter @University_XP and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com Game on!
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2023, December 3). Stefan McNinch UnBoxED. (No. 100) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/100
Internal Ref: UXP4D550WGDI
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