A World Filled with Darkness, Dungeons, and Dragons

This paper describes an experimental 6-week approach to teaching Beowulf in two senior high school college prep English classes. The goal was to employ a low-cost, non-digital, tabletop role-playing game (RPG) in a way that would increase student engagement, encourage collaborative problem solving, and develop a range of student literacy skills. This paper describes the instructional goals, instructional methodology, and results, concluding with the instructor’s impressions of the experiment and plans for future iterations of this course structure.