Ideas for a cross-curricular project in lower secondary
You may use and adapt these ideas as you please for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC). Please, credit Line Reichelt Føreland & Lenka Garshol if publishing. The game can be purchased and downloaded from Steam or Itch.io, but for school use, we recommend contacting the author, Mattis Folkestad, for a bulk-buy of licences.
These ideas are inspired by suggestions published by Kulturtanken (https://magasin.kulturtanken.no/spillstudieark/embracelet/).
Relevant subjects: Norwegian, (English, Spanish, French, German – if played in those languages), social sciences, arts & crafts, music, health & life skills, sustainable development
Equipment needed: One PC or tablet for each playing pair.
Teacher’s role: The teacher should play the entire game ahead of time to be familiar with the narrative and potential paths directed by the decisions in the game. During the game play, the teacher should work as guide asking questions and encouraging discussion in the pairs.
Pupils’ roles: You are going to steer the main character, Jesper, and decide what he should do. You need to discuss what you are going to do before you make a decision. Note down critical points which directed your journey; include also why you chose what you chose. Try to answer these questions:
- Main characted – who is he, what is hius personality, what is special about him?
- Which other characters do you meet? What function do they have in the story (or what do you think will be their function later)?
- What kind of narrative/story is this?
- Were some of the choices difficult to make? Did you disagree? How did you decide what to do?
- What do you think about the music? What role does it play in the gaming experience?
- What do you think of the graphics? Does it make a differences that the graphics is not always realistic? What role do you think it plays?
- What is the role of the bracelet (Embracelet)?
Potential tasks after the initial session(s): Write the story: What do you think will happen next? or What do you think would have happened if you chose something else when…?
Crosscurricular project:
- Play the game over the course of several weeks in language classes (English, Norwegian og foreign languages) with different discussion and reflection tasks along the way. The pupils need to have opportunities to present their theories to each other. Whrn they finish, they should present their result and discuss why/how they came to that ending (compare with others).
- Sustainable development: Starting from the game’s narrative, the pupils can work with topics related to environment and sustainable development. In the game, the (oil) industry is introduced both as something negative but also as something which hinders depopulation. Which role does industry play in small communities and how does potential contamination of the environment influences these communities. The pupils should use both examples from the game and other sources to prepare a presentation of a concrete case/scenario.
- Health and life skills: The game brings up several themes which are relevant for young people, including the growing responsibility for own life, honestly/loyalty towards own family, and identity questions. For example, the main character can at one point choose whether he is romantically instersting in a male or female character (or neither of them). This theme is worth exploring even if none of the players choose non-heteronormative ending. In that case, the teacher should show this alternative ending themselves.
- Democracy and citizenship: Topics such as depopulation, work opportunities, and the influence small communities have on their own life are central in the second part of the game. The inhabitants of the island Slepp are mostly presented as non-agents who have very little impact on the decisions which concern them. This can start a discussion related to: “Democracy and citizenship as an interdisciplinary topic in school shall give the pupils knowledge about the basic tenets of democracy and its values and rules, and prepare them for participating in democratic processes.”
- Follow-up discussion: What do pupils think of the story? Would they have told it differently (how)? Let pupils create alternative multimodal narratives using both text and pictures/video/music.
