FREE GAME NIGHT

Come and join us for a game night dedicated to the nonprofit side of Spielbound! We work all over the Omaha area to promote and fulfill our mission: striving to educate, engage, and create community through board games. We have 4 branches that all depend upon our large, donated library and our volunteers:

• Education – works to develop young minds by challenging them! Programs include: day camps, game-specific lesson plans, and UNO educator trainings.
• Stay Sharp Seniors – devoted to the senior community in many areas that include developing senior game-playing groups, researching the health benefits of gaming, and creating accessories that make games more accessible to all.
• Spielmasons – a collective of board gaming enthusiasts that meet weekly to play and test games developed locally.
• Everyone Plays – our primary community outreach: game events all over Omaha, daily demos in our library, and endless opportunities to engage with people and organizations.

Dr. Mark Mills drawing diagrams on a blackboard during testimony before the Congressional Joint Atomic Energy Committee hearings on atomic radioactive fallout, 1957. Hopefully integrating games into your curriculum isn't quite this complicated.

Hello readers of Spielbound.org! The summer may be in full swing but that doesn’t mean that work stops for teachers. We’re participating in summer programs, working on strategic planning, and writing next year’s lessons! At Spielbound my goal for the summer is to start some serious work on getting some teacher guides going to help classroom teachers get the basic information they need to consider using existing games as part of their curriculum.

As I started this process, my biggest goal was to incorporate the realities of classroom teaching into a resource that would help an educator take the first steps into using games. I’ve spoken on this blog before about how logistics can be a challenge in the classroom. We have standards that we must meet. This doesn’t prevent us from innovating curriculum, but it means that we have to be very efficient in squeezing as much time as possible out of our available class time. For games, that means that any teacher guide that we produce at Spielbound needs to communicate how much time it could take students to have a great experience with a game. But that’s just a beginning.

Omaha Gives!

Omaha Gives! is a 24-hour online giving event organized by the Omaha Community Foundation to grow philanthropy in Douglas, Sarpy, and Pottawattamie counti Ies. The goal is to inspire the community to come together for 24 hours to give as much as possible to support the work of public 501c3 nonprofits in the metro area. Today only, every dollar donated to Spielbound as part of Omaha Gives! will be matched by another dollar up to $3,500!

Spielbound strives to educate, engage, and create community through board games. We are a thriving community center for people of all ages, featuring a library of over 1,800 donated board games. Funds received support:

1. Education - providing teachers games and lessons for their classrooms.
2. Stay Sharp Seniors - providing games for seniors to prevent dementia.
3. Spielmasons - game creation and play-testing group.
4. Everyone plays - teaching games almost every day of the year!

SUMMER DAY CAMPS

This summer we will be hosting two camps for middle school-aged students interested in board games (June 1-3) and board game design (July 18-22).

Summer Kick-Off Day Camp

From June 1st to June 3rd, Spielbound will be hosting a three-day board game camp for middle school students. Board games can be an instrumental tool to grow and encourage skills in spatial reasoning, math, critical thinking, group work and cooperation. Throughout the days, students will have an opportunity to learn games from multiple genres with the help of Spielbound staff and volunteers. The games selected for the camp will give students a comprehensive understanding of the skills and fun to be gained through collaboration and play. Lunch will be provided each day, send any dietary restrictions or ability limitations to [email protected] and we will work to accommodate them in advance.

Summer Board Game Design Camp

From July 18th to July 22nd, Spielbound will be hosting a five-day board game camp for middle school students. Board games can be an instrumental tool to grow and encourage skills in spatial reasoning, math, critical thinking, group work and cooperation. Throughout this camp, students will have an opportunity to learn games from multiple genres with the help of Spielbound staff and volunteers, to identify the structures of board game design, and to then design a working prototype of their own board games. The games selected for the camp will give students a comprehensive understanding of the skills and fun to be gained through collaboration and play. Lunch will be provided each day, send any dietary restrictions or ability limitations to [email protected] and we will work to accommodate them in advance.

In my last blog post, I set the groundwork for Periodic Table Rummy, a simple card game to help students understand the periodicity of the periodic table of the elements. I decided to use Theo Gray’s The Photographic Card Deck of the Elements as my “standard” deck of cards for the game. The game plays like rummy, with some additions of my own to keep the focus on categorization.

Helium as seen in Theo Gray’s The Photographic Card Deck of the Elements. The top picture is top of the card, and the bottom picture is the "face" side of the card.

Here are the basic rules:

1. Shuffle the deck (picture side up) of 118 elements and deal 10 cards to each player.
2. Place the deck picture side up in the center of the playing field. Turn the first card over to form a discard pile.
3. Play begins to the left of the dealer. On a player’s turn, they have two choices: pick up a card from the discard pile or pick up a card from the top of the deck. A player always draws a card to start their turn. They will then discard a card from their hand. If they draw from the discard pile, they must discard a different card.
4. After their normal draw and discard, a player may lay down 5–9 cards in front of them that meet one of two criteria:
   a) Cards in the same group of the periodic table that all have matching card background colors.
   b) Cards with consecutive atomic numbers.
   Cards show the location of the element on the periodic table.
5. After laying down a set of cards, a player must:
   a) Read the entry for the “fact sheet” of the group of the elements being laid down, or the periodicity “fact sheet” if laying down consecutive numbers and
   b) A fun or interesting fact of one element laid down.
   If a player fails to read the information and the other players catch them, they must shuffle all their cards back into the deck and draw ten new cards!
6. After playing 5-9 cards and successfully reading them, a player redraws from the deck to make a hand of 10.