Student Design Board Games: An Alternative Assessment

Each Spring as I begin to move into my final units of the school year, most of the summative assessments that I’ve designed for students have been written assessments. Some years I’ve added in Socratic Seminars or other discussion formats. Other years we’ve had presentations. But, often I’m looking for some other assessments that break from these molds of reading, writing, listening, speaking. If you find yourself in a similar situation, I offer you an assessment that hits all of these four domains in a novel way: board-game design.

Students can make a board game to demonstrate their knowledge of almost any skill set or content you’ve uncovered together. If a student can write a question about it on a card, it can become a part of a board game. I recently used the board game design project with my Freshman English class who finished a unit applying Beers and Probst’s Notice and Note (or signposts) reading strategies to meso-American myths. However, you can ask students to design a board game about any book or any topic.

I suggest that you provide students with the basics and then let them break from the basics as they’d like.

The basics include:

Game Play Rules
A board (I give them some print-outs and a box lid stolen from the copier paper boxes)
A set of question cards (designed by the students)
A set of dice
Materials for designing game pieces (I give them markers, binder clips, and tape).

The Rules

I start with the most basic of board game rules.

Everyone rolls; highest roll starts.
Then each student rolls the dice and moves forward the number of spaces rolled.
When they land, a question card is pulled from the deck. The other player reads them the card, but not the answer written below the question. If the question is answered correctly, they can roll again. If not, the next player rolls.
You win by reaching the end of the board map.

The Question Cards

My students summarized a story on their question card and then asked the player, what is the signpost in this story? Explain. The cards could also be trivia questions about any book or text. You could quote a poem and ask what literary devices are in those lines. You could create cards that hide the answers and show the player a grammatical error that they can try to correct. You could ask students to design cards for all of these, synthesizing the units that you’ve covered that year. Really any content or skills except for questions with very divergent answers are a good fit.

Introducing Randomness

Ask students to mark the board with some spots that introduce some random components into the game. Move ahead three spaces, move back to the starting space, move another player back three spaces are all great options. You can also introduce some randomness into the question cards themselves. They can pull a card that moves them ahead three spaces extra if they get the question correct or moves them back three spaces if they get the question incorrect.

Iteration

Designing board games, demands iteration. Students should go through at least one practice round where they observe other students playing their board game and take notes about whether the question cards were clear, whether a winner was possible within a reasonable amount of game play, etc.

Tips

I’ve found that putting students in pairs for both gameplay and board game creation makes the project more manageable.

Here are the most recent resources that I gathered for our Signposting Board Games::Task Sheet with Rubric, Slides and Board Game Printouts

Happy Gaming!

Have you asked students to design games? I’d love to connect with you at K. A. Keener, English Teacher, New Directions Secondary School, or on Bluesky @kakeener.bsky.social.

Also, check out my card deck for analyzing poetry here at ExplicatetheGame.com.

At Moving Writers, we love sharing our materials with you, and we work hard to ensure we are posting high-quality work that is both innovative and practical. Please help us continue to make this possible by refraining from selling our intellectual property or presenting it as your own. Thanks!