Iteration of the CARDs

This post was originally published on July 21, 2011 at Play the Past:

A few months ago here at Play the Past, I wrote about the collection mechanic that’s a large part of the grammatical instruction in Operation LAPIS. The rewards for completing categories in that collection mechanic were those wonderful CARDs (digital only) that would then appear in their personal dossiers. From a certain point of view, these CARDs were nothing more than glorified badges and achievements -- examples of the dreaded gamification.

I’m here today to tell you that those versions of the CARDs as rewards for a grind were indeed a failure. I’m not really surprised that they were a failure, much as I tried to convince myself that they would work. On the other hand, the collection mechanic itself, rooted in the “Pokemon Thing,” was not a failure. The students that bought into the collection mechanic demonstrated a higher level of proficiency in the finer points of Latin grammar that I’ve seen most Latin I students demonstrate in the past.

So what was the problem? It’s actually quite simple. Why does the collection mechanic in Pokemon work as well as it does? The players get to do something with their Pokemon. They are collecting them from the wild in order to raise them, train them and battle them. We needed to figure out how to turn those CARD rewards into something that could be used, preferably something that also tied into the learning objectives for the course. You know, that whole 1:1 game rules:learning objective thing.


When we first started down the road of development with the CARD idea, we wanted there to be a physical game tied to them--that is, an imaginary-yet-real purpose to collect the CARDs. We looked at a lot of different models and were first intrigued by ways we might incorporate some form of the mechanics of Top Trumps -- namely, head-to-head battles between players that really go back all the way to the playing-card-game War. However, Top Trumps’ number-value mechanics don’t particularly align with any learning objectives for the course (it might be helpful for students to remember that Cicero was a better public speaker than Octavian, but assigning Cicero a 10 and Octavian an 8 actually seemed to us to cut against possible learning).

We also were particularly interested in ways that we might apply some of the mechanics from discussion games like Apples to Apples. Also, tor the classically-uninitiaed, there is also a serious (and seriously, nay wildly, popular) college-bowl-esque trivia contest in the classics sphere known as certamen. We also wanted to incorporate the high level of knowledge that participants in certamen have about all aspects of ancient history and culture in the new iteration of the CARDs.


Unfortunately we kept hitting the same brick wall over and over again: if you remove the straight numbers battles of something like Magic: the Gathering or Top Trumps, how do you determine a winner? Finally, at Games+Learning+Society 7.0 in June we saw the solution laid out before us: one of the mechanics of Eric Zimmerman’s (along with Local No. 12) renowned-in-the-game-community Metagame.

Metagame revolves around intelligent discussions about video games. From my perspective, the key mechanic in the Metagame ruleset is that any appointed bystander can function as a judge who decides the winner of the debate. This mechanic, I think, has a lot of implications for education.

On the CARD redesign

Decompressing after GLS, I sat down and laid out what would be the rules for what we now call CARD-tamen™ and the tie-in to the collection mechanic of Operation LAPIS. Also realizing that the original CARDs (while cool-looking) were obvious knock-offs of Magic: the Gathering, we also decided on a complete redesign centered around a Roman-themed deck with four categories of CARDs: historical people, significant ancient structures, places of renown, and Roman divinities.

We wanted to keep the overall feel of the CARDs the same but we needed a stylistic change that would allow us to be free of any litigation with Wizards of the Coast. The new designs, both in terms of content and style, are a beautiful representation of Roman culture in the form of a deck of cards.

Original Pompeiī CARD (left) and the new CARD (right)

On the rules of CARD-tamen™

The idea of CARD-tamen™ is simple: a roll of a d20 decides which of the twenty controversies the players will have to debate and then each participant, after selecting a CARD from their deck, has two minutes to prove to the iudex that their CARD is the more compelling answer to the controversy. The controversies range from declarations such as “More significant to world history” to “Greater contribution to the development of public speaking” to even “Inspired more significant stories.” (Students of Roman culture may recall that not-dissimilar controversiae formed an essential part of the education of young men destined for public life.)



In order to make their declamations better, players will go to resources beginning with Wikipedia and ending with scholarly articles on JSTOR to research more about their CARDs before playing their next game. In the very first round of play-testing with students, it took only minutes for one of them to take out a phone and look up some quick facts on Cicero. It took only a nano-second more for one of the other students to claim “Hey, that’s cheating!” to which the first student replied, “How? I’m using a resource to make my speech better.” When I heard about that exchange, I couldn’t have been happier: that’s precisely the effect that we wanted the CARDs to have. We’ve put just enough information on them to create a need to find out more.

But it’s the presence of what we call the iudex-mechanic, with its powerful effect of drawing in the bystanders to the activity, that makes the game matter, finally. Much research in educational psychology supports the notion that one of the most effective methods of helping students learn is fostering peer interaction. We hope that the iudex’s active role in deciding the winner will cause him or her, too, to feel the need to become more knowledgeable in the content covered by the 63 cards. In addition, anyone else observing the game will of course also hear the declamations made by each participant and gain knowledge of the topics.

The rules of CARD-tamen™ require the participant to talk intelligently about various aspects of Roman history and culture. That play objective also happens to be one of the learning objectives for an introductory Latin course or even a much more general course about civilization or history. The rules of the game foster the learning, rather than trying to transmit the content like so much chocolate on the broccoli of Roman culture.

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We just launched a Kickstarter campaign for CARD-tamen™ and would love the support from anyone interested in quality educational games or Classical studies. A preview of the 63 card deck (offered as one of the rewards for contributions) is located on the Kickstarter page:

Authentic Engagement (in June)

I just wanted to take the opportunity to comment about some authentic engagement and ownership of content that I observed in the past week.

The students (as operative-teams roleplaying the Recentiī) had at long last gained entry to the headquarters of the Societās Potentium and were now going through a series of tasks. After composing a series of three defense speeches about some of the most important figures in the late Repbulic (from Tiberius Gracchus to Juilius Caesar), the door to the final chamber began to open. At that moment, Marcus Maecenas and his cronies rushed in to attempt to thwart the Recentiī’s plans. For many of them they have been waiting the whole year for this moment; a real battle.

Prompt: You have no where to run. Five guards are present. Fight for your lives.


Describe in vivid detail your fight with one of the guards. You should make the fight exciting and engaging.

I turned them loose to compose their own narratives of their individual fights with the guards (five Recentiī - five guards.) As they were beginning to work out the details in class, I also decided to throw in a couple of extra objectives: most exciting narrative as determined by the Demiurge was to be awarded the Mars CARD and the best attempt at Latin composition was to be awarded the Apollo CARD.

The results were absolutely incredible, especially at a time when most students are checking out because, “hey, it’s June, man.” One group roleplaying Recentia Octaviana decided that a direct confrontation was not to their advantage, so (entirely in Latin) they described how they winked, blushed, and blew kisses at the guard to get him to come close to her. When he did, Octaviana pulled out a dagger (which was holding up her hair) and dispatched the guard, while exclaiming a witty line worthy of any action move, “Time to get you... out of my hair!” I should also add that they made great use of the emoticons along with the Latin verbs to help their classmates out with some of the vocabulary.

Another group described their “epic” battle, trading blows back and forth, even receiving a serious wound on one of their arms. Yet another group took a wound to the face that will become a permanent scar. One of the most inventive descriptions came from a group that composed two narratives: one from their point of view and one from the point of view of their opponent.

They researched how Romans would fight and used appropriate vocabulary. These battles were meaningful because they were their own creations -- not some passage that I gave them to translate. A few groups even included a few present participles, their most recent grammatical addition, demonstrating the desire to continue working at their full potential even in June.

When the dust settled and the opportunity to move into the final chamber again presented itself, the Recentiī would soon find themselves in major moral dilemma...

On winning the day before break...

While certain quantitative evidence points to the various success of Operation LAPIS, and I’ll elaborate on those more this coming week, a great deal of the success can be illustrated best through the plethora of anecdotal evidence that continues to pile up each and every day. As an illustrative point, I want to spend today taking you through the last few minutes of my LAPIS class on this past Friday. Oh, by the way, this was the last period of the day before April vacation. Anyone who has ever taught high school can attest to the usual attention and enthusiasm of the last day before a break (nevermind the last period of the day.)

To set the scene up, the Recentiī (the characters the students are playing) have been cornered by Salvius and strong-armed into joining the Societās Potentium (the equivalent of the optimatēs) although they been working previously for the Militēs Lapidis (the equivalent of the popularēs). This, in of itself, was posing a huge moral dilema for them. With their very lives seemingly on the line, they had a real good debate in their teams about the pros and cons of “switching sides”. Some decided it might be in their best interest to truly join the Societās Potentium, others decided that they might try to become double agents, while one group openly defied Salvius’ not-so-veiled threats.

After working dilligently on polishing their team’s response in Latin, each group posted one by one. When all five Recentiī had stated what their decision was going to be; whether or not they were going to swear the oath to join the Societās Potentium, I immediately posted the conclusion to the episode (and mission). Salvius, outraged at the open defiance of at least one Recentius, flew into a fit of rage, issuing orders for them to be punished. As the guards came rushing into the room, the ground began to shake and the colors and sounds began to fade in an out.

There was a disruption in the mechanism of the TSTT. A disruption they’ve known before.

A familiar voice appeared. The character they’ve had the strangest interactions with; Sinistrus. Simultaneously they received a broken communique from Mission Control at Project Arkhaia. Both messages were cryptic and of little help. 

Then darkness.

And a foul smell. A very foul smell.

And that’s how the class was about to end. The class right before a break. A perfect cliffhanger. 

Well, they weren’t content with that at all. So after some badgering, they convinced me to at least to let them throw some guesses out as to where they actually ended up. We went around the room, all 22 students, trying to guess where they were just sent to. A few of them, unbeknownst to them, were mostly correct: Egypt. Specifically, they are in Alexandria, in a pile of dead fish near the harbor. 

But they don’t know that and after they were done guesses they said, “Ok, so where are we?” To which I responded, “Oh, you’ll find out on the Monday after break when Mission 11 begins. You don’t have any work to do over break, so there won’t be a new episode loaded into the TSTT until then.”

The almost universal reaction: “Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!! YOU HAVE TO TELL US!!!”

Minutes left in the day, talk about the proverbial music to a teacher’s ears. Talk about engagement. Thinking quickly, I made a deal with them. I told them that the TSTT’s global-temporal positioning device was damaged in the latest power flux and if 10 CARDs were collected over break, it might be just enough to recalibrate to determine their time and location. They laughed. Bell rang and vacation began.

Today, after getting back from coaching the freshman baseball team, I awarded 5 CARDs. Yes, on the first day of April break, students were doing unassigned Latin work.

The First Days of Operation LAPIS, part 3

Continued from Part 2


As I noted at the end of the last entry, we had a rather large gap between meetings after the first two classes.  A total of six days had passed by before I saw them again.  My biggest fear was that all of the momentum we had from the first week would be lost after such a long layoff.  I worried that they would have forgotten all about the mechanics we talked about in week one and I would have to spend much of the coming week reintroducing everything rather than moving forward.  Another rather large concern of mine was taking a step back with regards to the atmosphere in the classroom.  Anyone who has ever taught a level one language or a group of predominately freshman, especially in a school as large as ours, knows that getting the students to participate and readily volunteer in the first few weeks is always a very difficult task.  They often don’t know very many other students in the class and they are extremely shy and reserved lest they make a mistake in front of twenty new faces.  Would we suffer a setback there as well?

One of the really great things about the way my schedule is set up for this year is where my two Latin I sections fall during the school day.  Our schedule changes every day, but these classes are always back-to-back and so I have an immediate comparison between the LAPIS section and the non-LAPIS section.  When we came back on that Wednesay after a six day layoff, it was a full six days for both sections.  They both sat through the whole period, mostly non-responsive despite my best attempts at the whole dog and pony show.  The LAPIS students did need time looking back at things we discussed in the previous week.  They needed a refresher on things like the TSTT Forums, the HUD, etc.  Many of them had not checked their email and so they did not know who was on their team nor did they visit the forums at all.  I had mostly expected this and, while disappointed, nevertheless we went through all of those topics again and by the end of the class they started to come back around a bit.  Their task for Wednesday evening was the log in and post in their newly assigned Team Forum and just say “hi” to their new teammates.  The main goal was the ensure that they all could post in the forums and reinforce how to navigate around.

I made myself available via Google Chat and email for most of the evening and quite a few of the students took advantage of that in order to figure out how to do everything.  They received a new CARD for doing so; Mons Vesuvius (and of course the LPs that go with it).  In the end, 21* out of 22 accomplished the task and started engaging in conversation with their teammates.  I was unprepared, I think, for the effect that this would have on the classroom dynamic the next day.


I saw the non-LAPIS class first and it was a fairly standard experience: they file in and sit in silence before the class starts, it is still a struggle to get them to open up to myself, to their classmates, to volunteer, to answer questions or contribute.  Nothing new or nothing surprising there.  Usually by the third week they start to come around and by the end of September we’re really in full stride with the atmosphere that carries through the rest of the year.  The LAPIS class, on the other hand, which came in directly after the non-LAPIS was an entirely different story.  They came in chatting to one another and immediately started talking with their teammates.  The dynamics for the rest of the class stayed at that elevated level.  While doing activities, a far greater number of hands shot up to volunteer, they more readily engaged in discussion back and forth about topics.  They responded to comments made by fellow classmates.  They more actively engaged with me.  To say there was a stark difference between the two classes after just one day would be a gross understatement.  There is absolutely no question in my mind that this came as a direct result of the relationships that they began to forge online the night before in the Team Forums.  You want a sure fire way to increase student engagement in the classroom?  Find a way to increase student engagement with each other outside of the classroom.

With the energy and enthusiasm firing on all cylinders, the Operatives were ready to head off Thursday night to do their first TSTT immersion prompt: Episode 1.1.a, The Boy in the Tree.  I had no idea when I left school on Thursday that what would unfold Thursday evening would exceed even my wildest expectations.  I’ll discuss what happened in my next entry.

*The 22nd student was the same student from the previous entry that was unable to accomplish the task.  He voluntarily approached me before class and asked if he could stay after school with me on Thursday to go through how to access the forums and go over, one on one, how to post, reply, etc.

The First Days of Operation LAPIS, Part 2

Continued from Part 1

With almost the entire class having succeeded in their task to to create a Google Account and move on to the next steps, I congratulated them and promoted all of them from ‘Recruit’ status to ‘Operative’.  A few of the students who were not confident in their computer abilities questioned whether or not they had done everything correctly.  This sort of thing is to be expected.  I assured that all of them had indeed done all the steps just as I had wanted.  After some general discussion and feedback about the visual guide, we moved forward to talk about other aspects of the course.

There was still a rather large feeling of anxiety and apprehension in the air but I knew that this was going to be an important first week to quell those fears.  My goal for day two was to introduce some new components while still moving at a slow pace in order to prevent any kind of panic.  One of the students asked about the ‘Demiurge’ and so I explained to them that I, too, would be playing a role in the story as the Demiurge (think: The Architect in the Matrix).  I think it helped them to know that I would be role-playing along side of them and that most communication outside of class from me would actually be coming from the Demiurge.  After fielding another question of just what ‘Demiurge’ meant, I displayed the second email that they had received the night before and went through the links and instructions that were contained in it.

First I opened up an example Operative Dossier (LP “grade” sheet) and walked them through the layout and what all of the information was included on it.  For many of the students, they thought it was very beneficial to do this.  They all had opened up the document the previous night but weren’t sure what everything was.  We did the same with the Carta Collectionis (Collection Sheet) and they had the reaction that I had hoped they would have: they were excited about the CARDs.  It was abundantly clear to me at that moment that we had hit the nail squarely on the head and tapped into the ‘Pokemon-thing’.  They were very excited to hear that there were many more CARDs to collect, and each one had a different set of circumstances to earn them.  They also immediately picked up on the other benefit of CARDs: LPs.  The CARDs can help them advance in levels and thus advance in grade.  “Gotta catch ‘em all?”  I have a hunch that more than a few will try to collect ‘em all.

The first CARD that they received (which was a foil edition of Pompeii) came to play an immediate role in the next step of the process.  I brought up the TSTT (the discussion forums) on the screen and we walked through the different sub-forums listed and how each one functioned differently.  Again, this visual walkthrough (even though they had a print guide in their email) was a big step in making it more accessible and not so scary to the students.  We even took a look at the first immersion prompt, Episode 1.1.a, and talked about the role those will play each night.  They immediately picked up on the TSTT Navigation Device (a custom Google Map link), so we took a look at that as well.  The first point in their narrative takes them just outside of the city of Pompeii, on a road, by a tree.  The shadow of Vesuvius looms overhead.  For many (if not all), they weren’t sure where we were geographically and so I showed them how to use the TSTT Navigation Device to their advantage.  Zooming out just once gave us a clear image of where Vesuvius was in relation to our characters.  Ah hah! That volcano!  Now we are getting somewhere.  Some did know that Pompeii was one of the towns devastated by the eruption so my next question to them, “When did this happen?”.  The first response blurted out was “That was on the CARD!”  Success!  The Operatives now know that they can gain relevant and important information from their CARD collection.

Their task for the second night was to log into the TSTT and create their own personal achievement thread in the appropriate forum.  This area is where the Demiurge is going to offer public congratulations and dole out titles and honors.  Two more students picked up special titles and some real honest learning took place.  Not satisfied with my assurance that they could think of the Demiurge as an all-powerful-creator-figure, one of the students looked up the Greek origins of the word and posted it for all the other Operatives to see.  He confirmed my definition, used the internet as a valuable research tool, and shared his discovery with the class.  For his efforts, he was awarded ‘Venātor Verbōrum’ or ‘The Hunter of Words’ as his title.

Day two was an overwhelming success.  It was apparent that a few who were very uneasy after the first day of class started to come around and be more receptive to the whole idea of what we were going to be doing.  It is too bad that I lost day three to “Hurricane” Earl.  I’ll meet with the Operatives again on Wednesday, so stay tuned for a discussion on the third (and final) day of the introduction to LAPIS where they will receive their Recentiī Teams and start learning their first bit of Latin.

The First Days of Operation LAPIS, Part 1

Operation LAPIS has launched at the Norwich Free Academy with great fanfare; at least in my mind, anyway.  I want to spend a little bit of time to put down my thoughts from the first few days about what transpired, what worked and what could be improved for version 2.0 next year.

The first day of school is a shortened day in which every class only meets for thirty minutes.  Thirty minutes is not a lot of time to explain to a room of mostly freshman, in their first day at an enormous school, that what they will be doing in Latin this year is going to be completely different from anything they have done previously in any academic setting.  At our stage of development (both of LAPIS and of practomime in general) one of the biggest challenges we face is still explaining, in a concise manner, just what exactly we are doing.  The question of how to go about this task preoccupied my mind the weekend and first part of the week leading up to Wednesday.

What I ultimately decided was to move at (what I would consider) a very slow pace as I introduced the various components over the first three days.  After letting them know that they would be doing something that hasn’t ever been done in a high school course before, I (at the very least) had their attention for the remainder of the short class.  We spent some time talking about the idea of ‘practomime’ and I tried to help them wrap their minds around the ‘role-playing’ aspect of the course.  My goal was to try to explain everything in a way that didn’t use other comparisons as a crutch (i.e., the Matrix thing).  In the end, using examples from popular culture proved to be more useful that I had originally thought it would be, and after making the loose connection of TSTT = the Matrix, conceptually we could move forward.

Throughout the entire class, part of me was a little terrified internally because of the looks on the student’s faces.  I could see it in their eyes that they were all thinking to themselves, “Holy cow, this guy is completely insane.”  Which, in all honesty, is to be expected given the drastic departure from “business as usual” that we are hoping to achieve with LAPIS.  Their homework for the first evening was simple: use the visual guide that I handed to them to create a new Google Account and to make first contact with the Demiurge (me) by sending a simple email that read “Awaiting further instructions.”

I had no idea what to expect.  I had no idea if half the class was going to run in a panic to try and get switched out of the course.  I couldn’t get a good reading from them at the end of the first thirty minutes.  I later found out that day that one of the students was in such a pensive state about the whole concept of LAPIS that they went to the wrong class the following period and sat through the whole thing before realized that they were in the wrong place.  While I feel bad about that, it reaffirmed that I had done something right in the presentation of the first steps.  If anything, it was a compelling enough start to have them momentarily lose themselves in the idea of Operation LAPIS.

After the day finished and the students boarded their buses, I enjoyed a fun lunch upstairs in the lounge with some of my colleagues, laughing and joking about the first day back.  Little did I know that while I had been eating my turkey sandwich, a half-dozen LAPIS ‘Recruits’ had rushed home and done the steps necessary to start the process of becoming full blown ‘Operatives’.  By the time I had finished my hour long drive back home, another half-dozen had done the same.  At the end of the evening, 21* out of the 22 students in the class had followed the instructions perfectly and created their accounts.  The majority of them waited for the followup email and performed those challenges as well (registering with the forums, viewing their first CARD, etc).  The first student to finish all the challenges was awarded a special title, ‘Celerrima’ (‘the quickest’), which will display by their name every time they post.

Day 1, by my reckoning, was a complete success and set up perfectly a productive second day.  I’ll go into the details of that in a post later this weekend.  Stay tuned for more.



*I talked to the 22nd student before class started on the second day.  He gave the standard student excuse for not doing a computer-based assignment that I’ve become accustomed to hearing: “Oh, my computer is like broken or something.”  I explained to him everything we are doing outside of class required that he have access to a computer and that if he couldn’t get his computer fixed, we’d have to see about moving him to a different section of Latin I.  By 2:30pm that day (school ends at 2:15), he had taken the steps required to move ahead.