Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game, initially designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. The game is structured as an open-world game following a narrative the Dungeon Master (DM) has chosen. The players, assume the personality of an imaginary character of their own choice, and follow an -interactive- story, which challenges them to overcome obstacles and defeat enemies by working together and combining their strengths and weaknesses. Its adventurous and collaborating nature, has made Dungeons and Dragons a great medium of alternative education though out the world. Teachers use it to make their students interested in certain subjects, to boost their creativity, their self-esteem and social skills. (Michael Smith, 2019) S.T.E.A.M education can be benefitted from this kind of approach. Even though S.T.E.A.M try to be creative by using various kits and projects, students are often guided through building specific projects and are less encouraged to experiment, research, collaborate and use their imagination to solve problems. In our workshop, we propose a different approach of S.T.E.A.M learning, based on collaborative, fantasy, role-playing tabletop game.
The process is divided in 4 parts: the character projection, the world building, the story and the challenges. The first step requires that each student creates a character with a specific back story and character traits. This way, the students can express themselves through the safety of an imaginary character (Center for Innovative Teaching and learning, n.d.), set the skills they wish to acquire and make their point of view known to the rest of the “party”. Depending on the characteristics and skills of the character, the Dungeon Master/Tutor, can provide each player with some cards that will prove useful in later challenges. The second step, the world building, can include both students and tutors. The tutors can choose the setting of the campaign, for example a historic era, a literature book, or a fantasy world. As the campaign runs, the students can be involved in the creation of physical representations of the world, such as maps, character figures, buildings and accessories, developing their designing and fabrication skills. The third step, the story, is the most important step in the process, as it is the thing that keep the students/players interested and devoted to the campaign. The story must be based in the world that has been already set and be inclusive for all the students/players, interesting and full of challenges, which is the last step of the process. The story can include various challenges, depending on the subject the Dungeon Master/Tutor wants to explore. We propose an interdisciplinary approach, where each campaign contains challenges from different scientific areas that require collaboration between the students/players, research and resourcefulness. One such challenge, for example, can be the following, “Your party walks down the tunnel when suddenly it starts to collapse! You run as fast as you can until you reach an opening in the cave. You made it through but… oh, no… you are trapped. You are on a cliff! There is no way back and the bridge to the other side has been cut. What do you do?” In order to overcome this obstacle, the students, must communicate with one another, compare their skills and inventory, ask for more information, do some research or invent something. Depending on the proposed solution the DM can accept it or point weaknesses, indirectly, through the story rather than stating plainly what’s wrong with it. For example, “You set the gears in motion but the new bridge is still too heavy to move. You must find a way to drop it with more ease or it might break.”. Through this process the students can develop their soft skills like communication, teamwork and decision making, test their knowledge and learn new things through real-life like situations and be independent when it comes to realize their own ideas.