I run a board games club in the school I work at. Playing board games is an excellent way for pupils to develop skills such as risk management, negotiation, numeracy, reading and comprehension, creativity, logical analysis etc, the list goes on. One of my personal favorite games is CodeNames. A card game for 4–8 players (but can be played with as many as you like) designed by Vlaada Chvátil and published by Czech Games Edition. Two teams compete by each having a "spymaster" give one-word clues that can point to multiple words on the board. The other players on the team attempt to guess their team's words while avoiding the words of the other team. In a variant with 2–3 players, one spymaster gives clues to the other player or players.". During the Coronavirus Pandemic I started playig this with friends online over a Video Chat using the website HorsePaste. It occurred to me that if I could use subject based vocabulary then this would be a great game to play with pupils in a STEM club. The Horsepaste website allows you to import your own words. I've put together a spreadsheet of the key words from some STEM subjects to make it easier to filter and find the words I want. You can find this here. You can see an example in the picture below of what it looks like with subject specific key words. Follow these steps to get it to work:
- Click on the custom words box.
- Change the name it gives you to the left of the GO button to something else.
- Deselect the current set of words, probably defaults to English.
- Copy and paste the words from the spreadsheet and add any more you want. They need to be comma separated.
- Remove the comma from the last word in the list.
- Click GO
- Read the rules to Codenames here
Please let me know in the comments below if you give it a go.
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