Acts: The Game

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Acts: The Game was created by Gary Yamasaki of Columbia Bible College.


Any teacher knows that engaging students who have grown up in a media-rich environment that, some would say, has left young people with an attention span that can only handle information in 30 second sound bytes, is a challenge. Imagine teaching the book of Acts to 40 of them at a time. This is exactly the challenge faced by Dr. Gary Yamasaki, who has been teaching at Columbia Bible College (CBC) for fifteen years in the area of New Testament.

Yamasaki is a creative teacher, who uses different media tools in his classes on a regular basis, and so was thrilled when the AV tech department built a media cart to house a DVD player, VCR, projector, speakers, cables… you get the idea. But he doesn’t limit his teaching to electronic gadgets. His classes also make use of standard lecture styles and storytelling from his own life and the lives of others. He is an engaging and dynamic speaker.

So coming up with Acts: the Game was not a great stretch of Yamasaki’s imagination. At first he taught the course in a standard lecture format, but as he thought about the content of the book of Acts, it occurred to him that it would lend itself well to a game format. And being a competitive person by nature also meant the game format would fit his style.

“Acts is a narrative book, it’s a story that has a geographical progress, essentially beginning in Jerusalem and ending in Rome,” he explains. “The idea of the game is to get to Rome first.”

The course still has the standard elements of any class: readings, lectures, group discussions, exams and quizzes (with a few movie clips thrown in for good measure) it’s just that now, many of these elements have been incorporated into a game format.

He developed a PowerPoint game board that shows a map with a starting line in Jerusalem and a finish line in Rome with 60 spaces to navigate in between. The class is broken up into teams of five or six and Yamasaki creates these teams to ensure that they aren’t working with people they already know.

“At one level, this is simply a precaution to prevent the formation of cliques within the teams,” he says. “ At a more important level, however, I want this experience of working in a team to serve as training for the students in working with people they do not know—or perhaps even people they know, but do not like—a skill so helpful for functioning in the real world.”

“Teamwork is huge for the game to be successful,” says Andrew Crosby, a student who took the class last year, reflecting humorously about his own experience. “I was part of a team where people didn’t even always show up… I still have some bitterness about that.”

“Gary puts the teams together so you’re not with the people you know,” adds Dustin Siemens, another Acts student. “It makes you get to know others which is good – especially in first year.”

Students earn points as a team and towards their individual mark. There are bonus markers on the map and whenever a team crosses the marker, each person on that team scores a point towards their own individual grade, to a total of five points. Points are also scored by individual pop quizzes based on daily readings, group quizzes, regular attendance, and team challenges. Another incentive for getting to Rome is a pizza party for any team that actually makes it. And for the team that comes out ahead by the end of the course, the members get their names engraved on a special Acts: the Game plaque.

Kent Thiessen and Naomi Dunaway also took the class and enjoyed the experience both for the game that it was and for the way it made them learn.

“It teaches you that you have to do your readings every day, so it forces daily study,” Thiessen said. “I also learned a lot about the culture in that society, about the honour system that was going on.”

These four students are also taking Greek with Yamasaki and when asked how the two classes compare, they all agreed on the answer.

“Apples and anvils,” Dunaway says. “There’s no comparison. But the format depends on the course content. I don’t think (the game format) would work for Greek.”

Last year, Yamasaki present the concept of Acts: the Game to a session of the American Academy of Religion / Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) convention, the largest gathering of religious scholars held in a different place in North America each year, drawing as many as 8000 people from around the world. SBL presentations typically deal with cutting edge developments related to Biblical studies and Yamasaki felt that this method of teaching fit that category. He sent in a proposal, was successful, and as a result of presenting Acts: the Game has had inquiries from far away as New Zealand.

“I felt honoured to have the opportunity to share my ideas with other Biblical studies professors, and I appreciated the opportunity to get feedback from them,” he said.

But perhaps the most satisfying comment comes from students whose view of the book of Acts are changed because of their experience in Yamasaki’s class.

“I have to say that I really didn’t want to take (Acts) because I found the book to be long and boring,” one student wrote to Yamasaki. “You made it come alive in your class. What you taught has clung to my brain – when I read it now… I can really enter the story. You’ve cast the New Testament in a whole new and more understandable light.”


Source:
http://www.columbiabc.edu/?action=d7_article_display&Join_ID=82329&template=stories_articles.htm7



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