“Make your own religion”: The fictive religion assignment as educational game

Abstract

This article considers the "create your own religion" or "fictive religion" assignment as a pedagogical tool, contextualizing it within the scholarship of teaching and learning, and positioning it as a tool for broad adoption in a variety of courses. I argue that we ought to conceptualize the fictive religion assignment as an instructional game, and make use of scholarship on teaching through games as a foundation for my analysis. While I offer the example of my own fictive religion assignment as a case study, the overall argument is a theoretical one, namely that the assignment works because of the nature of games.

Game-Based Learning in Higher Education Using Analogue Games

“…Overall the articles broadly reinforced the pedagogical value of analogue GBL (Gibson & Douglas, 2013;Gil-Domenéch & Berbegal-Mirabent, 2017) in students' engagement and satisfaction (Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018;Montenegro & Greenhill, 2015;Zeller 2018), especially in subjects that students consider boring (Juliano, 2019), abstract, or too complex (Johnson, 2019). Moreover, analogue GBL is also discussed by the authors as a strategy that fits both the needs and the abilities of the students (Zeller, 2018), while allowing connections between different areas of learning (Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018) to promote a wide range of skills and competences.…”

“…Overall the articles broadly reinforced the pedagogical value of analogue GBL (Gibson & Douglas, 2013;Gil-Domenéch & Berbegal-Mirabent, 2017) in students' engagement and satisfaction (Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018;Montenegro & Greenhill, 2015;Zeller 2018), especially in subjects that students consider boring (Juliano, 2019), abstract, or too complex (Johnson, 2019). Moreover, analogue GBL is also discussed by the authors as a strategy that fits both the needs and the abilities of the students (Zeller, 2018), while allowing connections between different areas of learning (Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018) to promote a wide range of skills and competences. These fields include the following: acute care skills (Gibson & Douglas, 2013); personal hygiene practices (Bassey et al, 2020); religion (Zeller, 2018); probabilities and statistics (Johnson, 2019;Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018); business management skills (Sugahara & Lau, 2018); mathematic skills (Gil-Domenéch & Berbegal-Mirabent, 2017; Ku et al, 2014); geography (Sardone & Devlin-Scherer, 2016); law (Juliano, 2019); history (Larkin, 2017); human rights (Montenegro & Greenhill, 2015); engineering (Li, Huang, Jiang, & Chang, 2016); and global economy (Takahashi & Saito, 2011).…”

“…Moreover, analogue GBL is also discussed by the authors as a strategy that fits both the needs and the abilities of the students (Zeller, 2018), while allowing connections between different areas of learning (Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018) to promote a wide range of skills and competences. These fields include the following: acute care skills (Gibson & Douglas, 2013); personal hygiene practices (Bassey et al, 2020); religion (Zeller, 2018); probabilities and statistics (Johnson, 2019;Lyford, Chen, Rhar, & Kovach, 2018); business management skills (Sugahara & Lau, 2018); mathematic skills (Gil-Domenéch & Berbegal-Mirabent, 2017; Ku et al, 2014); geography (Sardone & Devlin-Scherer, 2016); law (Juliano, 2019); history (Larkin, 2017); human rights (Montenegro & Greenhill, 2015); engineering (Li, Huang, Jiang, & Chang, 2016); and global economy (Takahashi & Saito, 2011). Moreover, analogue games and approaches were also discussed as engaging, considering the usage of tangible materials, such as LEGO ® blocks (Li, Huang, Jiang, & Chang, 2016), that enhance concept visualization.…”

Teaching Religion to Undergraduates in the 2020s: A Preliminary Reconnaissance

“…We know of several innovative approaches to packaging religious studies in individual courses and in departments. Immersive technologies, gaming, and interactive fiction that appeal to many students are creative ways of approaching course design (Johnson 2018;Lester 2018;Zeller 2018). Some departments have turned toward interfaith education or interreligious studies, often on the model of Eboo Patel and the Interfaith Youth Core (2019).…”