#Teaching Tool

[s7ieben]

Hungarian – English Alphabet

aquarelle, ink on paper – painting, drawing – 200 x 70 cm

The hardest part of this project for my little one was to find the perfect words for kids’ fantasy which has the same meaning while starting with the same letter. We tried it and it works perfectly well in unnoticed learning.

S7IEBEN.art

[thoodleoo]

i think the key to being a successful classroom teacher is having an ordinary classroom material (eg pen, highlighter, book) but in a really and truly ridiculous size and using it regularly without comment. nothing both throws off and enchants a student of any age than more than walking up to your desk to ask you a question and pausing with baffled uncertainty as they see you grading papers with a pen so large you cannot actually hold it the way you would normally hold a writing utensil. there is a brief moment as they look at you where you are able to raise an eyebrow and go "yes?" while acting like absolutely nothing is odd about the fact that you are currently writing with a multicolor my little pony pen that is half the girth of your forearm and in that moment you hold the most power in the entire school. use it wisely

[educationandlearn]

Unleashing the Power of Animated Education: A Transformative Teaching Tool

Regards, eager learners and passionate preceptors! moment, I am thrilled to dive into the instigative world of animated education, a groundbreaking tutoring tool that has the implicit to revise the way we learn and educate. Read more

[ankiflashcards]

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To Learn & Retain Languages with Spaced Repetition

Remember all the times that you learned something just to forget it when you get rusty after not practicing for a while? Now imagine that there is some way to remind yourself of only the things that you are about to forget before you forget them, without boring yourself with the ones that you have already memorized. You may think that this would be convenient but also impossible, when in fact, it is possible using spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a method of learning new material and then reviewing and memorizing that material over spaced intervals. Spaced repetition is often carried out using flashcards. The cards that you memorize successfully (i.e., easy material) will be reviewed less often, whereas the cards that you stumble over and struggle to memorize (i.e., hard material) will be shown more often.

In essence, spaced repetition is an enhancement of the old technique of learning by flashcards. Flashcards rely on cramming the material into the learner’s memory regardless of how many times the learner successfully memorizes the material. This makes the learning process inefficient and exhausting. Spaced repetition addresses this flaw by presenting the material to the learner with a frequency that is inversely proportional to his or her ability to memorize it. This way, the learner will ideally be presented with the learned material right before he or she is about to forget it. As you can guess, this technique comes in handy when used to learn new vocabulary.

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[science-lings]

I feel like ppl focus on Bruce training the robins to kick ass from a young age when that’s definitely not all that was. He had to teach them field medicine and how to pick locks and sneak around silently and how to notice things, sure he taught them how to hit things with sticks of multiple sizes, but he also taught them how to grapple around and land from a fall.

They probably had intimidation lessons and interrogation lessons and sessions where they just meditated for hours straight. They’re taught how to calm down civilians and to train their voices to sound different in costume and so many things that would make them the most terrifying children to live with.

Bruce is actively training them to be good at bothering him because they like trying out their new espionage skills at Galas and trying to sneak around him while he’s asleep to prank him.

When we think of training to be Robin it’s easy to think of sparring and gymnastics equipment when it’s fun to remember the other parts of it. Some days Bruce would probably just give the kids a Hunt a Killer box and a time limit.

[mroddmod]

she’ll be alright because she had you.

[yousavorthis]

weekends at bobby's

[bvcktommy]

it's always i love you and never "leave." "huh?" "i'll tell everyone that you died in the woods. so you can go back to your brother and get to open a bar just like you've always dreamed of." "why?" "i don't know. maybe because you'd sacrifice a hand for me. or maybe because i've crossed your line. or because i... i like it when you're happy. just leave. go now before i change my mind. just go! that's an order!"

[haveihitanerve]

Ok ok hang on-

Has no one, ever, once, mentioned how fucking golden it is that Damian exists? 

Look at this kid. Look at him. It’s a child. A child. Not only a child- but a literal, physical, emotional copy of Bruce. Bruce. 

Holy fucking shit guys the potential. 

The batkids, every single one of them, has beef with Bruce in one form or another. Dick more than any of them. 

And then there comes this kid. This fucking child.

And hes been raised by assassins and that explains and excuses a lot- but he literally Bruce. 

But they cant hate this child. Thats…childish. 

And thats what makes him so perfect.

Because Damian is Bruce as a child, and as such, he gets away with the things Bruce cannot get excused by being young. 

The other kids have to witness these habits, and they joke and tease and are like “oh our own little Bruce”

But they cant complain. They can’t hate him. He’s a kid. He doesn’t know better. 

…So, how do none of them connect the dots that- maybe, just maybe, Damian now is Bruce now, except Damian now will outgrow this because he has them, and Bruce never did. 

Idk. just thoughts.

[cod-dump]

If Nik is teaching yard work, what would teen!Farah and teen!Ghost be doing 🤔

He's definitely teaching them all the same things, just has them in rotation. He showed Farah how to work with the chainsaw first because he feels she's the most responsible.

Simon is digging up weeds with his bare hands, connecting with his inner mole, and Kyle is is cutting grass. Next rotation, Simon gets the chainsaw, Kyle is working on weeds, and Farah is cutting grass. Next rotation?

John notices his baby boy with a damn chainsaw and freaks out. He doesn't approve of any of them using the chainsaw.

[lastoneout]

"[New Farming Sim] is copying Stardew Valley!!" Harvest Moon came out for the Nintendo 64 in 1999

Edit: My apologies, Harvest Moon came out for the SNES in 1996

[j-richmond]

Why aren't comics more common in TTRPGs?

(This is about game design and presentation) In school one of the things I discovered is that I have trouble absorbing info from a big text book. And most TTRPGs are presented as text books. Once I understand the basic information in the book (chemistry textbook or RPG sourcebook or whatever) I can deal with the book on my own terms. I can dive into individual parts and learn, and slowly absorb the book as a whole. But I need help to get there. I need an access port. Sometimes this comes in the form of someone explaining the book to me. Explaining the rules of the game or the outline of an essay. This is great, and gives me a way in so I can absorb and master the book myself. But I don't always have someone in my life who can do that. Interestingly, I don't have this problem with novels at all. Narrative feels easier to access, at least for me.

In school I also discovered Scot McCloud's Understanding Comics. This is a pretty fantastic book which I'd recommend to everyone. It helped me understand how I process information. More importantly, it helped me understand the different people process information in different ways. I hadn't realized that at age 16, although I was starting to suspect it. Before I started making comics or games I used to be a teacher. As a teacher I could see that some of my kids were struggling with the information I was giving them, in the same way I had struggled in school. I started using comics in class to help reach these students. I'd draw little comics on my handouts or on the whiteboard to explain what we were learning. The goal wasn't to provide an entire lesson in comics form. I'm not Scott McCloud! Instead, I was trying to find an access point for my students. An on ramp. A port of entry to the ideas and material we were covering so they could engage and eventually absorb the information. It worked so well. It worked like magic. Why don't we do this more in TTRPGs? I used comics in my early games, Panty Explosion Perfect and Ocean. These were narrative comics, not rules comics, but the goal was to provide both an example of what play looked like (from a narrative standpoint) and a point of access for players who weren't sure what the game was or how to engage with it. My thought was that if you understood what the game was supposed to look like it would be easier to approach the rules. (A short comic from Ocean. The book has a bunch of these)

When my brother Nick and I started working on The Magical Land of Yeld I knew I wanted to use comics more directly as a teaching tool. Especially because part of our target audience was new and younger players who might look at a big text book (Yeld is a giant 400 page hardcover) and just bounce right off it. Like I did in school and like I often do with big games. So I needed to teach with examples and illustrations, and especially comics.

The first comics you'll encounter in the Yeld book are narrative, and designed to get you into the ideas and themes of the game. But in the first few pages we also start sprinkling in rules comics. These are presented along side the rules text. They don't replace that text, which is important. The text explains the rules in greater detail, and includes information that just couldn't be added in a single page comic. Instead, the comic is intended to be a point of access to the rules text. A player can read the comic, understand the basic concept, and feel comfortable engaging with the text. That's the goal, to make players comfortable and to make the rules text accessible.

We use comics to teach basic game mechanics, but we also use them to explain specific player facing systems. Sometimes these are things that really do need a comic to explain them, but sometimes we use comics as lures to draw player attention to mechanics that we're afraid they might otherwise not engage with. For example, in playtesting we found that when characters died during a fight the player would just sit there for the rest of the fight and not engage. It turned out, since you don't do anything in D&D once you die (except slowly die more), most players assume that's how all games work! So they hadn't even noticed that in Yeld you become a Ghost and get to ghost around and do fun Ghost stuff! I decided to create a comic that not just explained this but drew attention to it and showed why it was a fun (and important) part of the game!

Structure of play isn't always obvious to players, especially if they're new to TTRPGs or have only played D&D. You pick up habits from the games you play the most, and since most gamers play nothing but D&D there is a tendency to assume EVERYTHING works like D&D. Yeld doesn't, so we decided to take nothing for granted and make comics that very specifically show what a session of play looks like. In this example, it may not look a lot different from D&D, but the adventure is specifically divided into 5 parts. The comic illustrates these parts in a way that is easy to understand. The accompanying game text explains each part in more detail and illustrates how they are important to play. The comic serves as a ramp that gets players to the info they need.

Not all of our comics are player facing. Yeld has a rotating GM (which is awesome, btw), and this means every player gets a chance in the Game Master roll. Which means every player needs to understand how this roll works. Comics like this one, which explain how to build monsters to use in your game, help make the process easy to understand. Again, its about building a point of entry for players. A player might say "I don't want to GM, it sounds to complicated!" But its not. You just need to make it easy for them. Make the mechanics and responsibilities easy to understand. Show why they're fun! In Yeld, its important that each player takes on the GM role from time to time, since we're building a story together. Making it look fun is important! Comics help with that. What's more fun than comics?

Narrative comics are important too. At least for Yeld. I don't think every game benefits from them (although I always love seeing them). Narrative comics show players what the game is supposed to look like. What the characters do and say. What environments they visit. Narrative comics set a tone. Narrative comics let new players understand what a game is about immediately! We can hand a Yeld book to a new player or customer and they know what's up in seconds, just by reading a short single page comic. That's a powerful tool. So why don't more games use comics? Part of it is that game creators are usually not comic creators. There's not a lot of crossover. That always surprises me, but both disciplines take a lot of work. Who has time for both? Even when you have game designers that are comic creators, they often don't include comics in the games (Lancer???). I don't think this means game designers don't recognize the value of comics. I've had this conversation with so many game designers, and they usually agree that comics are useful tools. But if you don't know how to make comics, making comics for your game can be daunting. What rules should you focus on? How do you present that information in comic form? How many comics should you make? How do you hire someone to make comics, anyway? Hiring artists is expansive, btw. You know that, of course. Hiring an artist to make a set of comics for your game could cost you thousands of dollars (or more), depending on what you want. Of course, you can try to make your own comics. And you should! Really! A poorly drawn comic is not necessarily a bad comic. The point is to get your information across to your reader. to provide a point of access. You don't need great art for that (although great art can help attract people to your game). Stick figure work just fine. Here's an example, the layout for the Tea Dragon card game. Another artist took this layout and redrew it in their own style. But my goal here was to be simple and concise with my explanation of the rules. To make the game accessible.

There's a few more pages of this, but you get the idea. The purpose is to explain, and make the player comfortable with learning more. The art matters to the extent that it serves this goal. In fact, flashy or complicated art can get in the way! You'll notice in that most of the Yeld rules comics I posted above the art is pretty simple, with solid color backgrounds. You want to make your comics as easy to read as possible, and that includes avoiding clutter, overpacked word balloons and messy layout. Readers are easily distracted. It doesn't take much for them to set down a book at all. A complicated phrase or hard to read font can often be enough. And once they set a book down they may not every pick it up again. That's more true for a big text book than it is for a comics, but its still true for a comic. So our goal is to make our comic the easiest, smoothest point of access it can possibly be. So easy and smooth that the reader can slide right into the rules text without noticing! Here's my general process for creating a rules comic. This is from my friend Brian's game Scofflaws. I start by taking the basic mechanics that need to be illustrated and breaking them down into panels. The goal is to make each panel readable and not overwhelm the player. At this point I'm just doing a rough sketch. It may not eve=n be readable, but that's fine!

Next, I refine the text and art. I decide on the exact language I'll use, and I finalize where characters and other elements will be placed. As you can see, the actual layout didn't change much here. Sometimes it changes a lot!

Finally, I create the finished art. Honestly, the previous step was just fine. It explanans the rules I wanted to explain. But this last step allows me to add in some narrative flavor. The first panel contains a complicated background in order to present the game's setting. The characters look like the kind of characters you'll play in the game. This isn't nessacary for presenting rules, but it helps present the game as a whole. You want players to engage with every part of your game. The last thing you want them doing is picking up your dungeon crawling game and going "Oh, this would be great for playing Star Wars!"

(I probably shouldn't have chose than shade of red for the background. It makes the text a bit hard to read!) So again, why aren't we seeing more comics in games? Its not as if they don't exist at all, and I'm personally always excited to see them. I recently opened the Final Fantasy RPG box set and was so happy to find the rules were accompanied by cute comics. And there's lot of other examples (maybe you can post some in the comments). But I think comics are a clearly underused tool in game design and presentation. And as a comic person, let me tell you that you're leaving a valuable tool on the table if you're not considering using comics. Are they right for every game? Maaaybe not? But I think MANY MANY MANY games could benefit form them. Are they expensive? They can be. Are they hard to make? They can be. Are there people you can go to for advice? Hey, my door is open.

[vagabond-art]

i like him a lot

[sevastiel]

Lets be real, the void really needs to take a chill pill one of these days. Shits wiggin’

(The very thought of this image possessed me until it was made)

[betterlucknexttime]

thinking of how renee gives andrew her knives (protection) and jean her cross necklace (faith), being the first person to give them what they needed most.

[johnnyshrine]

★ 065 // “UNO, based on a true story” (Story below the cut!)

(Sometimes me and my partner will slip into improv RP over text and it leads to fun shenanigans. Like last night:)

(We then get in call to actually play cards. Johnny and Gyro play many riveting rounds of UNO and decide to turn it into a drinking game: whoever loses, drinks. This is the aftermath of that night:)

(Yes, this is real: I did lose at UNO 11 times in a row, and I have to tell the whole world this.... sigh....)