Hmmmm…. this starts dangerous thoughts in my mind.

@Barb: I’ve a Master’s degree in Applied Microbiology, teaching experience and over 25 years of DMing behind me. If my new career path plans work out as I want it to, I could free up enough time to take you up on this Offer… I’d love to mix so many of my life’s passions in one experience.

Plus I could teach French

Becky Thomas’ business is here:

http://www.roleplay-workshop.com/

Perhaps it is this one:
http://www.roleplay-workshop.com

Heck – make a lab class out of if, and and have them build the solution to a puzzle and see if it would work. (adult supervision of course)

For history lessons, check out the Treasure Hunter series for ideas. It’s d20 modern, and I think the writer is a teacher too.

I’m Barb the Homeschool Mom.

Thanks for all the positive comments. I really appreciate all the input.

A couple things I forgot to mention: although my son seems to be pretty interested in physics at the moment (at least the non-mathematical variety) I am also looking for folks who can creatively and subtly weave in a wide variety of other subjects as well. History of any period, foreign languages, the arts…

The ideal situation is to find GMs who have a passion for a certain academic topic (be it Ancient Rome, nanotechnology, Swahili, or whatever) and have them weave in bits and pieces of that topic into the game however they’d like. Perhaps they’d have odd or funny NPCs who quote Shakespeare, or have the characters enter an inn that time warps them into a future of nanotechnology. Obviously it takes a good deal of creativity and thought!

I want it to be a win-win situation. I believe the best teachers aren’t those who go to teaching school–they are those who have a passion for something and figure out how to share their enthusiasm with their students. Also, most of these kids are deep thinkers who can handle a lot of complex information, so I wouldn’t worry too much about going over their heads. But overall the keyword is FUN. If it gets to be too much like a school lesson, forget it. You’ll lose them in a heartbeat!

Right now, we have a bright young man starting a new text-based game for us. He is big on literature and language and will be counting on the parents to guide him as to how far and deep he’d like us to go with those subjects. He and the players are scattered all over the U.S. and they’ll be using the Obsidian Portal site for game play. We also use Skype, email, MapTools, etc.

I’m sure there are many folks wondering how much they might earn from this. My in-person DMs tend to average $20-$25/hour (we ask each player to chip in $5/hour). For online groups, we work it out depending on the individual situation (size of group, number of sessions per week, etc.) but overall I aim to work out a fair deal for both sides.

Thanks again for all the great input!

As somebody already noted using Ancient Greece or Rome as a campaign setting would not only be possible, but also extremely vivid and entertaining. The topographical, cultural, and historical material is there, as well as a population of historical and fictional (i.e. pulled out of Plautus or Terrance) characters.

It seems to me that a RPG, when used in moderation, could be exactly the kind of hook which could encourage students to approach the rote memorization of forms with a more enjoyable goal in mind than merely being tested on them.

A translation assignment that is assigned as the vital clue to progressing the story would mean more than merely an arbitrarily handed out block of text. And in the meantime, one would be directly instructing on the material culture, society and history of ancient Rome.

I am still thinking about the real logistics of this, but assuming a school with two years of Latin, one could drop this kind of RP in once every other week or once a month to spice things up and have a continuous story.

I really don’t know if such a pedagogy would find any sympathy in an official school setting, but I think that it would be a way to energize student and challenge their preformed notions of Latin Class as a boring rubbish class.

There is a niche that can be filled, but I don’t actually believe that there’s that much money in it. Unless you set up a private school and make educational RPGs part of what makes the school different, the common man puts a depressingly low value on education and the people working it that feel.

Still, I know the model can work! Heck, we’ve all learned countless lessons from RPGs.

I had a couple ideas that might be useful. Sorry if these are on other sites, I haven’t read up on this much yet. Wanted to write down what I was thinking before I lost it.

Some games recommend asking players what they’ve learned after a gaming session. It’s a way to sum up what they got out of the adventure in most games. For a historical learning game you could tell the players what differences, if any, there were between what happened in the game and what happened in the real world. Then ask them later if they can repeat those differences. (as a side note, I often wish movies, books, and other forms of entertainment included notes to this effect)

Math is kind of tricky. Most RPGs use basic algebra as a matter of course. Some rough ideas about probability help too. To teach anything other than this, perhaps a historical or semi-historical setting would work best. What if the PCs are apprentices to an architect who’s building something on a scale unknown before? Possibly one of the ancient wonders would work well for this. The challenges could be structured in such a way that the problems become slowly more specific. First, get the materials to the site. Start building, then realize it’s not fitting together well enough for the structure to be stable when completed. Start adding math and refining it. A magic spell or two could be used to avoid taking it all apart and starting again from scratch, but only if the math up to that point is correct for what you want them to learn. In essence it becomes a bunch of word problems chained together. I think the hardest part about this (for me at least) would be trying to nest problems inside each other so they go from simple and general to complex and specific. And one last note, be sure to have a couple late night raids from rivals to spice things up occasionally with combat and you’re good to go.

Music might seem like a hard thing to integrate in a structured way at first. It’s easy enough to add background music to entertainment for children. Tom & Jerry and Bugs Bunny used to do this a lot in the older cartoons. But to get children to learn and recognize music might be a bit harder. I keep thinking to tie music into spellcasting and everyone at the table has to play a clip of whatever music you’re studying to get a spell off. Maybe just ask them to justify why the tune fits? The Pastoral Symphony might be good for a light spell or for causing plants to grow. A Night on Bald Mountain most certainly wouldn’t. I guess the real question here is whether to assign possible magic effects to the tunes or try to fit existing magical effects to them. It’d be easy enough to add a bonus or penalty based on whether they remember whatever details of the song you deem important (composer, name, etc). You’ll probably need your NPCs to follow the same rules if you want to keep the interest of your players though.

Psychology might be easiest as a murder mystery style of game. Just make sure you throw a few red herrings out or you’ll be teaching them more about aberant psychology than anything else.

Sociology… Maybe managing a group of people through rough terrain? Running a village for awhile?

Literature is both too easy and too hard. You can imitate and migrate ideas easily enough. But that isn’t the same as reading the original. From what Barb said I don’t think this subject would be a problem. It might help some of these ideas if you were to place them in a well known and loved setting though. What if for the sociology game Frodo & friends don’t return to the Shire and the PCs end up having to solve the Wormtongue/Saruman problem?

For many of these you might need an NPC who’s an expert and can give hints but just doesn’t know enough to quite do it themselves.

This style of learning is great but it’s only useful if it’s engaging. If the players aren’t quite into it, don’t be afraid to bail on an idea and try something different.

I applaud this mother’s open mindedness toward the educational value of roleplaying games. I’m sure her son will learn a lot from the experience!

And to be completely meta about it – would it be possible to create a game with educational elements on how to play a game?

@Viriatha – It’s like someone shouting “Hey! Look at all these niches that we can expand roleplaying into?” Someone could make serious money here.

@Flying Dutchman – LOL@Pythagoras The Uncaring. Like Boccob but using geometry almost exclusively. Too good a Greyhawk gag to pass up.
.-= satyre´s last blog ..toolkit: conflict theory =-.

I’ve used D&D Minis game for basic math and logic skills and we’ve made some characters and talked about how to play RPGs. And we’ve played a few RPG video games together. Soon, we will start our first D&D game. I’ll let her tell me the basics of the story, then I’ll run it for her character. Hopefully, she takes to it well, and I’ll have her DMing by the time she’s 9.

I’ve had a few years into the eLearning industry, trying to promote simulation as a teaching tool (a “professional” way to express the idea of “game”).

Using D&D is an awesome idea for a number of topics.

I hope you’ll keep us informed of your progress
.-= Eric Maziade´s last blog ..On the road to Spellgu- postmortem =-.

I believe that I have have learned a lot of ‘basic knowledge’ on different topics over the years from D&D as a GM and a player. Varying from topics of cartography, geology, sociology and theology (world-building) to psychology, dispute resolution, history, and debating in general (dealing with players and being a player). All this while having fun? Hell yeah.

As such, I think this lady has a great idea. If it were me who had to, as a GM, teach several disciplines to children, I would have a hard time trying to integrate it all in a fun game depending on how many games I have to run to teach something. Because you are in the danger-zone of “awww, not this again!” when your paladin has to solve the puzzles of Pythagoras, cleric of the uncaring God of Math, and his evil equation goblins… But aside from that, sounds like a great concept.