Episode 117 Zack Hartzman on Teaching with Video Games
Zack Hartzman on Teaching with Video Games
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points by University XP, host Dave Eng chats with Zack Hartzman, a licensed secondary school teacher from New York City and the creator of Hey Listen Games. Zack shares his journey of integrating video games into the classroom and discusses the motivation behind Hey Listen Games. They explore the evolution of game-based learning, emphasizing the need to diversify educational mediums for student engagement. Zack highlights key principles from his book, "Teaching with Video Games: A Strategy Guide," focusing on the potential of video games to teach problem-solving, mechanics, and foster relationships beyond traditional boundaries. The conversation also covers Zack's involvement in the Game Awards Future Class, an initiative diversifying the gaming industry.
Zack Hartzman
he/him/his
Teacher & Founder of Hey Listen Games
High School NYC Department of Education
zack.hartzman@heylistengames.org
Zachary Hartzman is a licensed Secondary School Teacher in New York. He teaches high school Social Studies in New York City where he has taught Global History, United States History, Economics, and Government. He has a Masters in the Teaching of Social Studies from Teachers College at Columbia University. He is the founder of Hey Listen Games, where he creates curriculum for teaching with video games. He is also a member of the inaugural Future Class for The Game Awards. He has been featured in a number of educational podcasts where he advocates for game-based learning in schools as a way to increase engagement among students and social emotional learning. He frequently travels to video game and comic conventions in order to both learn and share how to utilize geek culture as a method of making learning more fun and improving school culture. He is active on Twitter (X) at @HeyListenGames
(Twitter): https://twitter.com/HeyListenGames
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 by going to www.universityxp.com. On today's episode, we'll learn from Zack Hartzman. Zack Hartman is a licensed secondary school teacher in New York City. He teaches social studies and holds a master's in teaching from Columbia University. Zack is the founder of Hey Listen Games, where he designs and discusses educational video game curricula. As a member of the Game Awards Future Class, he promotes game-based learning and advocates for its benefits on educational podcasts. He has also written two books, Teaching with Video Games: A Strategy Guide, as well as Teaching with Video Games: An English Language Arts Unit. Zack, welcome to the show.
Zack Hartzman:
Hey, Dave, thanks for having me on.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thanks to have you. I'm really glad to have you here Zack. I want to jump into the first question here, which is learning more about Hey Listen Games. Specifically, I'd like to learn more about how did your background in teaching inspire the creation of Hey Listen Games, and what specifically motivated you to integrate video games into the classroom?
Zack Hartzman:
Yeah, so I'll start with the motivation part. When I was in grad school originally 11 years ago now, I had a professor who always advocated around incorporating graphic novels and film into our history classes.
And so I already knew when I was going to be a teacher, that was something I was going to pursue in my social studies courses, which I did a lot in my global history and US history classes. We watched Schindler's List one year, we watched Saving Private Ryan one year. We've read Persepolis when learning about the revolution in Iran, the Islam Revolution in Iran. We read a Magneto comic when learning about the Holocaust. So I spent a lot of time, my first couple of years finding ways to incorporate comics in film, and it always went super well because it's not that comics and film are better than traditional books, it's just when you kind of diversify the mediums that students engage with, they usually stay more engaged because it's fresh, they're not just looking at a white piece of paper with a block of text constantly throughout the year.
So it's kind of important to rotate through the different types of mediums that you use in your classroom. And I saw... And since I'm passionate about comics and film, and I saw that those were kind of working really well, I started to think about ways that I can bring gaming into my classroom since I've played video games my entire life. And that originally started as just an afterschool club, and it was super popular. I'd have 40 kids come to my room once a week to play video games after school. And then that evolved into doing it during lunch pretty much every day.
My classroom just became a Super Smash Brothers cafeteria for a year, and they were loving it. And I quickly saw that there's potential here to bring video games into my curriculum, not necessarily a game like Super Smash Brothers, but just games in general. So I started dabbling with various video games. The first one I ever used in my socialized class is called The Republia Times. It was a game around propaganda where you kind of manipulate the headlines on a fictional country's newspaper to build loyalty or sow disloyalty. And I taught that when they were learning about propaganda during World War II, and it went really well.
So from there, I kind of just kept expanding different types of games that I was bringing in. And in each case it was only two or three a year that I would use. This is not really replacing the core curriculum of the class, it was more just like when I had time, what was a cool way I could bring a game in to kind of reinforce what I was already doing in my class. And as I started to do it more, other teachers... and I was talking about it with teachers, they started to become more interested in it. And so I started leading some PD sessions in my network of schools. And then from there, a lot of people were telling me I should start sharing things online. And that kind of birth Hey Listen Games. So I created a website where I make the vast majority of my curriculum and lesson plans available for free. You just need to make an account.
And then, yeah, it just kind of became more noticed. It's not the most popular site in the world by any means. I put a blog post up once or twice a year, just kind of giving an update on the games that I'm using or new lessons that I made. But it's been pretty cool.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Thank you for sharing Zack. I think that one of the things that really resonated with me is that you really focused on video games as another form of media. I mean, you talked a little bit about using films in the past, also using comics, and I often discuss this with other educators. Games itself is another form of media. We're not really talking about using it to replace the media that you use right now, but like you brought up before as a way to augment what you're already teaching.
Zack Hartzman:
Yes, exactly.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. I'm curious though, can you tell me more about the title Hey Listen Games? Where did that come from?
Zack Hartzman:
Yeah, so my favorite game of all time is Ocarina of Time: The Legend of Zelda. And that's a game that I played, came out when I was six or seven years old. And I learned a lot from that game, just my general vocabulary because there's no spoken dialogue. It's all text-based. So for a 6-year-old, I spent a lot of time learning just the actual English from doing it. It taught me collaboration skills because I was playing it alongside my older brother who I've always fought with, but not when we were playing this game. We actually worked together. And there's a character in the game, Navi, she's like a companion. And whenever you get lost or you're unsure, she would basically yell, "Hey, listen," at you to get you back on the right track or point you in the right direction. So from that, I kind of came up with the name Hey Listen Games, right? So it's like me kind of pointing you in the right direction to get you started using video games in your classroom.
Dave Eng:
I see. Okay. That clarifies it. I thought it actually came from the first Diablo. I don't know if you ever played the PC version, but there's a guy-
Zack Hartzman:
I never played the original. I played three and four.
Dave Eng:
Okay. Well, I remember... I can't think of the character right now off the top of my head, but in town he sounds like a Sean Connery knockoff, and he says, "Stay a while and listen," so I thought that Hey Listen Games came from that. But I want to talk more about specifically your book, Teaching with Video Games. I think this is where the most interesting part of our discussion will come about. Could you elaborate on some of the key principles and insights discussed in the book, Teaching with Video Games: A Strategy Guide, and specifically how can video games go beyond traditional educational boundaries to teach things like problem solving, mechanics and foster relationships, as you mentioned in the book?
Zack Hartzman:
Yeah. So the book is in a couple of parts. It's more, a third of it is around pedagogy, a third of it is around how to get started technology wise, what do you actually need in your classroom, and then a third of it is a bunch of sample lessons that you could start doing. But around the pedagogy, it's more like the idea is all of us have gamers in our classroom. Without a doubt, more than half of kids play video games now, whether it's console, whether it's PC or on their phone, and not even always playing. There are millions, millions, millions of kids who watch people play games on Twitch or YouTube. So they're engaging with video games in some capacity. And students learn best when you tap into their prior knowledge and bring that into... that's part of culturally relevant teaching. It's bringing in what they know and aspects of their life into the classroom to help them engage with your material.
So video games is something that they're using often on a daily basis. And I hear teachers constantly complaining about, "Oh, their students are not doing well because they're wasting time playing video games or this thing up late playing video games." And I'm always like, "Okay, so use video games. They will engage if you give them something around gaming, whether it is playing a game in class, whether it's getting them to write about video games, you tell a kid to write a review about a video game and they'll do it if they're into that," or give them a game guide as a text that they can read. There's so much content around video games that we can use with those kids, especially if they're struggling readers and writers, get them to write about a topic that they're interested in and they'll do it.
And then also that's pedagogy from the student side. But then there's also pedagogy from the educator side where we are our best when we bring our passions into the classroom, when we're passionate about something that's infectious. And so the students kind of feed off that energy. So when I'm bringing a video game into class, it's because I like that game. I'm not just picking a random game that I find boring or that I don't like. I would never use that. So when I'm bringing in a game, it's something that I've enjoyed. It's something that I've learned from, it's something I think they can learn from, and then that kind of just builds up the energy and builds up... helps create relationships between us. They can see that I'm actually enjoying my job when I'm with them in class. That's the main gist of it.
Dave Eng:
I see. And I think you just circle back onto something you said before when you started this original club of students at your school, they were all gathered around Smash Brothers. I'm assuming it's Super Smash Brothers Melee. Is that correct?
Zack Hartzman:
No. I mean if it was up to me, it would be, but they were playing the Nintendo Switch one, Ultimate.
Dave Eng:
Oh, I see. Okay. Because I grew up with the original one on Nintendo 64, so I never really know which version people are talking about whenever they bring up Smash Brothers. But you bring up a good point about going to where students are at like what is in the zeitgeist, what do they know, what are they playing on a regular basis and kind of meeting them there. I think this is some of like... sometimes faculty members or instructors get criticism because they're using classic texts to base their curricular off of, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's kind of hard to relate to something that was written several hundred years ago. Whereas video games are very much contemporary, it's a media that's being consumed right now. So I think, like you said, meeting students where they're at, using this as a framework for teaching, learning and education is a really critical way of addressing specific learning outcomes, but using games as the medium in order to do so.
Zack Hartzman:
And it's not even just meeting them where they're at. So I teach my main social studies class, but I actually do teach an elective English language arts class as well, where we play video games as pieces of literature. In my school in particular, it's an international school in New York City. It's a 100% immigrant and English language learner population. So while I'm teaching them content, I also have to teach them language, and they're English language learners everywhere. There are not native speakers everywhere. And there are games that I use where there is no text, there is no dialogue. It's a story that's completely told around the environmental or auditory or visual storytelling. So you don't even need to read, but there is a story being told, and you can still teach them concepts like conflict, irony, point of view, perspective, and without their understanding of language bogged them down.
An example is the game Unpacking, which came out two years ago now, where it's just a story... the gameplay is you're literally unpacking your box of stuff into your room first as a child, but then the next level it's clear, oh, you just moved to college and now you're unpacking your things in a college dorm room, and then you graduate and now it's like six years later you're moving into your own... you're moving into an apartment with roommates, and now you have to unpack your things alongside other people's things. And then you have a partner and then you break up, and then you get another partner, and then you get married and there's a kid. So it's like, but none of this is being said to you. It's all visual.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Zack Hartzman:
And that's something that's not going to happen really ever in books, and it might happen in film, but if it's in film, they're not engaging with it physically. They're kind of watching and consuming it.
Dave Eng:
We didn't explicitly say it before in our discussion, but games are this model for interaction. You can't engage, you can't play passively. Games very much need that model of engagement. And I think overall, that level of engagement is something that is not necessarily new, but something that I don't think is used as frequently as other educators and instructors use. But with that being said, I wanted to talk about the third and last questionnaire, which is the Game Awards Future Class. You're a member of the Game Awards Future Class. And we talked about game-based learning as an advanced pedagogy, but not necessarily something that's new or I wouldn't say something that's novel, but something that can be used as a way to promote games as a new form of literacy. Can you describe what the Game Awards Future Class is and how you see the future game-based learning evolving in educational settings based on what you shared so far?
Zack Hartzman:
Yeah. So the Game Awards Future Class is... so the Game Awards is every year hosted by Geoff Keighley. It's a big event in the video game industry. It's sort of like the Oscars, but for video games where they have best game of the year, best performance of the year and so on. And starting in 2020, this is when I was inducted into this, I was in the first class, they chose 50 people. Each year they choose 50 new people from around the world that are the language they use are diversifying the industry, making it more inclusive by creating an inclusive future for video games.
And generally speaking, that's mostly just people within the gaming industry. So it's people who are making games, it's people who talking about games, people who are writing about games. And in that first year, I was the only teacher, which was really cool, so I was the only person that's not actually in the gaming industry. I'm in education, but I was chosen for it, which is awesome. And since then, each year they've chosen one more educator or librarian each year, which is awesome. So they're now making a point to highlight one type of educator every year that's using video games in some cool way in their schools.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Zack Hartzman:
And in terms of the future of game-based learning, it's becoming clearly, at least in the social media sphere, it's becoming more apparent that there are those of us that are doing this there. Using video games in the classroom, it's still very niche. There are not a lot of people that are doing it. There are not a lot of educators that are comfortable trying that. There's still a stigma around video games for a lot of people and whether or not they can be educational, and I'm not talking about educational games. When I use video games, I use standard regular entertainment games just in an educational way.
But it is clearly becoming more popular. When I tweet about it on social media, I don't get pushback from anyone. Everyone's like, "Oh, that's so cool." And then they're often asking for me to share ideas and share materials. And constantly, I do get messages from people who have tried my lessons or have bought my books telling me how well that it went with their students. So it is a slowly growing thing. I sort of equate it to when I was a student in public school, comics and graphic novels were nowhere to be seen. That was not a thing that teachers were using in schools at all. But at least in New York, you go into any library and they just have sections upon sections of manga and comics and graphic novels and teachers everywhere are starting to use these as actual texts in their classroom. So I feel like maybe 10, 15 years from now, video games will kind of be where comics and graphic novels are now. So we're still in those baby stages of really incorporating gaming as an aspect of education.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Excellent. And I wanted to also point out, because you'd brought it up before, I had seen you in the schedule at the last New York Comic-Con because I had attended, but not as a presenter. But I was glad to see that you were there representing the field of using games for teaching and learning, and I'm just glad that you were able to get exposure to that audience. And I think that when I saw you on the schedule last, it was not your first appearance. You'd been there multiple times. Is that correct?
Zack Hartzman:
Yeah, the past three to four years, I've been doing a panel or two at Comic-Con. Nice. And I also do... there's the PAX conventions in Boston. It's a video game convention that usually every year I apply to bring five of my students to Boston to sit on a panel and have my students actually talk about their experience using games in my class to a room full of educators. And that always goes really well.
Dave Eng:
And what grade do you teach?
Zack Hartzman:
Currently in my social studies class, currently I'm only teaching high school seniors. But over the course of my teaching career, I've taught nine through 12.
Dave Eng:
I see. Excellent. Glad that you got to share. All right, so that brings us to our outro, Zack. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Zack Hartzman:
So the easiest way to find me is probably on Twitter or X, however you want to call it, @heylistengames on Twitter. You can also head to my website, it's www.heylistengames.org, and I have a contact form on there. So if you don't use social media, just hit the contact form. It'll shoot me an email. Yeah, those are the two easiest ways to get in contact with me.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you Zack. I'm going to include the links to both your website and also your handle on Twitter in the show notes so people can check them out.
Zack Hartzman:
Awesome. Thank you.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more than a great place to start, it's my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it for free at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in a description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from game-based learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. So 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 love 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, otherwise known as X @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). (2024, July 28). Zack Hartzman on Teaching with Video Games. (No. 117) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/117
Internal Ref: UXP7P1ITL2SM
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