Teacher brings classroom and personalized learning to life

In a galaxy not so far away, there exists a world where science fiction books are banned and proficiencies are virtually impossible to obtain. Created by Westside teacher Andrew Easton for his English 9 honors students, this world is part of a game played during the class’ science fiction unit. The game will take place during the entirety of the unit, which started after Thanksgiving break and ends Dec. 19.

Easton was first inspired to create this while at an ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference over the summer.

“I was talking to an individual named Steven Isaacs [who] got me in touch with Mr. Paul Darvasi, who teaches in Ontario,” Easton said. “I first read Paul’s work on his blog, and I created my own variation inspired by what he had done. Paul’s narrative mirrored the narrative of the novel his students were reading at the time.”

There were, however, some major differences between the two.

“We’re doing a choice novel unit, so since there’s not one central storyline, I had to create the whole story [for the game],” Easton said. “I started in a place where I was like ‘Okay, we’re going through sci-fi, so we’re going to create a dystopian setting, and I want it to be immersive,’ [where] the kids would play out a role in whatever’s going on.”

The game, called “The Eastside Awakening,” immerses students in a fictitious world where they attend a school called Eastside High School. Westside theater teacher Jeremy Stoll plays the part of the dystopian principal, Jeremiah Stollin. The principal is drilling his students with test after test so they can be proficient on the exam that decides how much funding the school receives.

“By putting students in situations it causes them to engage in the content in a way that’s pretty real,” Easton said. “What I was hoping to create with this was a chance for them to experience a dystopian setting, which is in all their sci-fi books.”
At Eastside High School, there is also a group that is in opposition to this approach to education, called “the Awakening.”
“There’s this ‘Awakening’ that happens [at Eastside], where you join a cult[…]against taking these tests,” freshmen Kelly Kroeger and Emma Rieser said. “Then we get books that are banned because we joined the cult. You have secret missions. One is to hold a secret meeting, which is kind of like a practice graded discussion with other people that are reading the book.”

At the start of every class, the students watch a video featuring Mr. Stollin that furthers the narrative of the game and sometimes also provides a clue for a mission.

“One of their missions is to graffiti on the walls of Eastside,” Easton said. “The theater department donated panels to us and the art club painted them and the students right now during class will go up and write quotes from their books on the ‘walls.’”

Once the students have completed a mission, they email the leader of the Awakening, “Myster E,” played by Easton. For the game, each “teacher” has their own email that the students can send and receive emails from.

“When they finish the assignments, they email me and then I send them clues,” Easton said. “There’s a really big real-world element to all of this because there’s clues that have been in this building since August.”

Each clue leads to another and the end goal is to be able to completely fill out a hall pass, which the students received when they got their book.

“You have to unlock something at the end, which is what the hall pass is for,” Rieser said. “After you complete each mission, you get a clue to what you put in the hall pass.”

However, the students need to do a lot of work and preparation before the mysterious pass can be filled out.

“Wherever they need to go, there’s something that they need to do there,” Easton said. “There’s a lot of different things that they’re going to have to have figured out by the time they get there too. Otherwise, they’ll run into things that stop them.”

Easton hopes to incorporate this new approach to learning into other units as well. However, it might not be until next year that this way of teaching surfaces again.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to do it again this year because I have been working on this since June,” Easton said. “It took more of wrapping my mind around how to set all of it up than anything else. The actual setting up of it has gone quick. It’s been fun.”

When posed with the possible opportunity for another unit with a similar setup to this, Kroeger was all in for it as well.

“If that was a possibility, I would definitely [participate],” Kroeger said. “I [like this type of learning] because it’s fun to put yourself in a simulated world and it encourages you to work harder to complete the missions and to complete them well.”

Although “The Eastside Awakening” is a game with missions, it is by no means a competitive game.

“There’s not really an overall winner, it’s not a game in the sense that someone’s going to become champion,” Easton said. “Myster E is just prompting them to be free-thinking individuals, to be people who value literature, a conversation, [and] who aren’t going to buy into the standardized approach to education.”