Cornelia Hofmann

Project <<Board Games>>
Board game class
There have been two board game classes in Germany since the 2024/25 school year. One at the Stadtteilschule Hamburg Horn under the direction of Markus Zimmermann and my ‘Spiele-Gruppe at the Laborschule. In both classes, board games are used as a supplementary educational medium in subject lessons until the first school-leaving certificate after year 10. We are researching the long-term development of pupils' skills and are also trialling the subject-related use of board games in everyday life. We hope to create a good basis and to be able to pass on our experiences to other teachers. By doing this we hope to establish a foundation for board games to enter curricula and be recognised as an educational tool in general.

Conditions for successful play
Playing parlour games with teenagers in elective courses or working groups is the setting in which we research the conditions for success. The primary aim here is to observe and ascertain what conditions need to be created in order to be able to play successfully with teenagers in (elective) lessons. The aim is to develop a concept for working groups and (elective) courses after we have summarised our results using semi-narrative interviews, which will be evaluated using qualitative content analysis, possibly extended by grounded theory.

Emotional and social development
To what extent does playing board games regularly influence the emotional and social development of our pupils? Within the class, in the year group and school-wide as well as in extracurricular settings, games are played with different other groups. In each case, the young people are the explainers.
In progress:
[Erasmus project ‘Storytelling and Board Games: Emotional and social benefits for studtents’ is the working title of an application with Erasmus+. This is a cooperation with the Netherlands, Belgium Greece and France].

Games library at school
At the Laborschule we are currently working on a games lending scheme for the whole school, similar to a school library. As the games lending service involves different requirements and work, this is not a possible additional task for an existing library, but needs to be well thought out and planned. We look at different concepts and write a ‘best practice’ concept, also for passing on to other schools.
---
Project <<SPEaK (Students and Personnel Exchange Knowledge)>>
Planning and organising the student exchange with Prague and Brno for implementation. We collect data on the learning gains of students, work out best practices for the organisation of such an exchange in cooperation with the English Department.