While the subject matter may be grim, the learning process doesn’t have to be. As their final major grade of the term, Mrs. Sharon Vernon’s AP Lit classes got creative to craft board games based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment.
“I thought making board games would be a cool project instead of just doing an essay because we do so much writing this semester already, and this is a way for students to display their knowledge of the novel in a more creative way,” Vernon said. “Making board games still deals with themes and figurative language and events the same as one of our timed writings would, it’s just something more unique.”
Vernon’s classes began reading Crime and Punishment Jan. 13. The book takes place in 19th century St. Petersburg, Russia, where the impoverished and irritable main character, Raskolnikov, seeks to escape his ordinary nature through committing a heinous crime.
“This is an important novel to teach because it’s timeless,” Vernon said. “People make mistakes, people do horrible things, and it’s all about how you cope with the guilt. And some people do better with that than others.”
Throughout the course of the book, Dostoevsky explores themes of alienation, guilt, redemption and love.
“It was weird because the language and everything didn’t make me feel like I was reading something super old,” senior Luke Reinert, whose group created the game Clue & Punishment, said. “It doesn’t feel like it was written 150 years ago. It was a cool story.”
The project was posted in Google Classroom Feb. 14, and the first step for students was finding a group and assigning roles to each member. The three main roles were Group Leader, Creative Director and Game Designer, in charge of writing the rules, designing the board and creating the question cards, respectively. For groups of four, there was also the role of Game Engineer, who would assist with the overall development of the game.
“I chose to be the Game Engineer so I could help out with the team in a lot of ways,” Filmon Andemichael, who was also involved in creating Clue & Punishment, said. “Other than giving suggestions for the board, I also edited the questions.”
Students were given a few class periods each week to work on their games, but otherwise the project was to be completed outside of class.
“We decided to base our game off of Clue since it makes a lot of sense with the story,” Reinert said. “Then we just brainstormed how we could incorporate events of the story, wrote down ideas, and saw which ones worked. For the design stuff, we made lists of the characters and places and then picked the top five from each.”
The day before spring break, exactly one month after the project was initially assigned, students in Vernon’s classes got the chance to actually play their games.
“I don’t think there are many English projects where students get to create something and actually see if it works,” Vernon said. “If you’re just reading a book you’re just reading a book, if you’re just writing an essay you’re just writing an essay; the board games are an entirely new creation, and you get to see the fruition of it.”
