Play School

What if your school week involved colonizing planets, fleeing Nazis, or negotiating with fantasy kingdoms—all while studying history and science?

In this episode, we meet Mathias Granum, the founder of EPOS, a groundbreaking Danish boarding school where students learn through live-action role-play (LARP).

Granum explains how EPOS transforms traditional subjects into immersive experiences that teach not just academic knowledge, but critical life skills like empathy, public speaking, and conflict resolution.

He also shares the school’s journey from idealism to realism, the importance of structure in creative education, and the surprising things he learned from Britain’s strictest school.

It’s a story of costumes, creativity, and the courage to reimagine what learning can be.

Visit epos.dk for more information.

Visit www.archipelagoaudio.com for more information.

Transcript

Mathias Granum: During this community meeting, we were like 80 role players in this fantasy parliament and the debate was getting heated and personal and unconstructive. There was this girl who was in the sixth grade, so around 11 years at the time. Suddenly she shouts at the top of her lungs, "Can't you see? You are ruining our society with your constant bickering." And everyone fell silent. This young girl was then elected as governor of the island and she made peace and had people listen to each other once again.

James Clasper: Welcome back to Archipelago, the podcast about arts, culture, and ideas in Denmark. I'm your host, James Clasper.

Last time we explored what happens when a group of volunteers decides that suborbital space shouldn't be reserved for billionaires. This time we'll visit a school that takes imagination even further. Where teenagers spend their days negotiating with fictional kingdoms, and learning history, science and maths through magical quests.

This is the story of EPOS, a Danish efterskole that's turned education on its head by making play the foundation of learning. Here, students don't just read about history. They live it. They don't just study conflict resolution. They practice it as warring factions in elaborate role-playing scenarios. And they don't just memorize facts. They discover them through adventures that would make any fantasy novelist proud. I first wrote about a very similar school for the Financial Times many years ago, and I thought this story would follow the same path and be all about the great success role-playing has been in an academic setting.

But it turns out that Mathias Granum, the founder of EPOS, has discovered something unexpected in the 10 years since he set up the school. Something that might surprise you as much as it surprised me. So to find out more, I spoke to Mathias and began by asking him: what exactly is a Danish efterskole?

Mathias Granum: A Danish efterskole is different from what you might usually associate with the word "boarding school." It's a school where students go and live and study together for one year. Usually what makes these schools special is they have a strong profile. Some schools focus on music, others on drama or outdoor living or sports. Our particular school has the focus of learning through play, particularly role-playing games and simulation games. We call it "Edu-LARP," which means educational role-playing games—live action role-playing games. Edu-LARP is where you use role-playing games to teach academic skills.

James Clasper: Okay, so live action role-play. Talk me through what that is. What is LARPing?

Mathias Granum: Well, it's a bit like theater where you play a role, you create a story, but it's theater without an audience—or you are all the audience at the same time. Usually there's a script, there's a story, but there's also quite some freedom for every player to create their own storyline within the narrative. So it's different from Dungeons and Dragonsor what people usually might associate with role-playing games. It's not all about being orcs or fighting dragons.

James Clasper: How long does this take? Is it an hour? Is it longer? What is the typical look and feel of a LARP?

Mathias Granum: It could be anything from a day to a weekend to a full week. At our school, our LARPs are one week long, with some preparation before the week, but the actual game is for one week.

James Clasper: It is still a school though, right? So we're talking about regular subjects. They're still doing a curriculum of sorts—Danish and English, maths, etc.

Mathias Granum: Yeah. They have the same subjects as in other schools, but we can choose the format and the way we teach. There's a lot of freedom given in the Danish boarding school system.

James Clasper: Okay. How does this work? How do you apply a role-play game over the course of a week to the school environment and classes and prepping for exams?

Mathias Granum: Yeah. So first of all, we have a narrative framework for the week. It could be space—a journey into space. It could be the Reformation in 16th-century Protestant Europe, fighting Catholics over who owns the truth. It could also be students playing explorers from another world, visiting our world to learn about its natural laws or culture. So there's a narrative framework. The overarching narrative aids the students in remembering what they learn. Our brains are just better at remembering stories or facts related to stories rather than facts that are out of context.

Then second, we have the academic content of the week, which we teach sometimes in character, if it fits the theme, sometimes out of character if that's easier. But it might be that if my students are explorers from another world, I might take the role of an expert rather than a teacher. I'm an expert or advisor for these explorers, telling them what I have found out so they can judge what they think is useful in this world.

We have the framework, we have the academic skills that are taught—sometimes in a classroom setting, sometimes in character. Then there's the free elements of the play where students are free to go out and maybe negotiate, persuade each other, make a deal, or enact some drama and conflict that are relevant to the theme.

Of course, the content differs a lot depending on whether the game is about Danish Jews fleeing from Nazis in 1943 or about colonizing another planet in a distant future.

James Clasper: And what age are the kids typically?

Mathias Granum: It's eighth, ninth, and tenth grade. So age 14 to 17 years.

James Clasper: Can you paint a picture of what an Edu-LARP week looks like at EPOS? From the costumes to the props to the stage design, if that's the right way of putting it—what does an Edu-LARP week look like at EPOS?

Mathias Granum: Yes. So an Edu-LARP week usually starts one or two weeks before the actual week with the leader of the Edu-LARP explaining to students what the theme of the course is. What are the academic elements we want you to learn through this week? They get some background information that they need to play the game.

Then on Monday morning, the students typically all meet in our lecture hall, together with the leader of the week, who gives them some academic background. Let's say the role-playing game is about the Reformation in 16th century Europe, when Martin Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church. So they would get some facts there. Probably they would also have received those facts the weeks before in their regular classes.

They would maybe learn about which factions they are going to play. Are you Catholics or Protestants? Are you upper class? Are you nobility? Are you a peasant? Then usually there's some time where they go out into groups to meet in their factions.

During the week, the days would be a combination of classes and free play. Classes could be that all students circulate through different topics. Sometimes they have the classes just as a class—as themselves as students—and sometimes in character, where the teacher is not the teacher, but the expert or advisor or whatever suits the theme.

Then in the free play, it's time for negotiation. In the case of this Reformation role-playing game, it might be where you have family conflicts about which truth to believe. Maybe you are haunted by devils who are whispering in your ear, calling you a sinner. These kinds of dramatic things. Maybe you have to pay the bishop some money for him to forgive your sins—these kinds of things to set the scene of this period.

Then, on the last day, we are out of the roles—on Friday—and we discuss: What did we learn? What was reality and what was fiction? That’s also important in some role-playing games because the students have freedom. Things might happen that actually didn't happen in the real world. So we have to just make sure that they know what is fact and what was fiction.

James Clasper: Okay. Let's put some meat on the bones there. Paint me a picture of a recent LARP that you've engaged in at the school.

Mathias Granum: Yeah. So a few weeks ago we did a weekend LARP called The Settlers of Storm Island. It's about five nations who travel to the same island to start a new life. They encounter each other and have to sort out: How can we create a society that bridges the cultural gaps between these five different cultures?

So it’s a fantasy role-playing game with elements of intrigue, family drama, and kind of Game of Thrones elements. But also it’s a game about politics and voting and arguing and achieving compromises.

James Clasper: Okay, so at the start of the week or the weekend, everyone is assigned a role—a character?

Mathias Granum: In this particular game, they choose the characters some weeks in advance so they can prepare and make a costume. But usually, when we have Edu-LARPs—educational role-playing games—they also pick a role or receive a role some weeks in advance so they can get into it and find a costume and so on.

James Clasper: So what are the rules of the game? How does a game develop? It kicks off—and then what happens?

Mathias Granum: There are not many rules. Some games have lots of rules, but in this game, there's more like a structure. The rules are like: you vote to make a decision. So during the game, you choose certain positions of power, or you can vote for or against laws.

There’s a rule that there's a majority vote, and that's how we resolve conflicts within the game dynamic. But otherwise, it's not a very rule-based game. The rule is that we have a culture saying: “play to lose.” So it’s about creating the best possible story, rather than playing the game to win.

James Clasper: It reminds me immensely of improv. Improv theater.

Mathias Granum: Mm-hmm.

James Clasper: I assume a lot of it is improvised?

Mathias Granum: Yeah, that’s a good analogy.

James Clasper: Okay, so I'm up to speed on what LARPing is—and it sounds fun—but we're still talking about a school context. Square the circle here. How does this game, The Settlers of Storm Island, for example, get applied in an educational context? How is it pedagogical? How is it applied in terms of subjects—Danish, English, maths, what have you?

Mathias Granum: Yeah. So this particular game is a weekend event. Although the students learn a lot about 21st-century skills and negotiation, politics, and so on, it’s not as such an academic role-playing game.

But we have other role-playing games that are more focused on academics. It could be a game where we simulate the Danish Jews when they fled the Nazi occupation in 1943. Danish fishermen helped them escape to Sweden. So we might simulate that episode—that point in history. The fishers—some being corrupt and others helping from a good heart. The priests—speaking out against the Nazis but not being able to speak too forcefully because they risk their own imprisonment.

That kind of setting, we recreate as a LARP so they can experience it. First they learn about the period, so they have the facts, and then they create this game together.

James Clasper: So if I’ve understood it correctly, the kind of old-world thinking of “Okay, these are the facts and you need to learn the facts—and only if you’ve understood the facts and have regurgitated them in a test do you pass,” what you’re aiming at is something that is much more, as you said, 21st-century. So it’s skills that aren’t testable, but actually, maybe they matter more. Is that the pedagogical thinking behind using this kind of approach to learning?

Mathias Granum: Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that you learn something and then you use it—you apply it. And the learning part can be done quite efficiently in a classroom setting. Actually, I think the strength of a LARP is not so much in learning basic academic skills. It's really hard to learn proper punctuation or grammar or the chemical properties of metals through a LARP.

But what it is good at is consolidating these skills and combining them with 21st-century skills like negotiation, public speaking, and so on. So, for instance, let’s say we have a lesson where students play explorers from another world. They come to this world and discover what are the energy sources in this world, and can we learn something and bring it back to our own fantasy world?

Maybe they learn about fossil fuels and nuclear energy and renewable energy sources. And they learn about the pros and cons of each of these energy sources. So that's the learning part—that can be done as part of a role-playing game where I play the role of an expert rather than the role of a teacher, and they play the roles of explorers. But it’s still quite similar to a classroom setting.

Then the next part is that they go out to discuss and argue about which energy source should we bring with us home. And we know that one of the best ways to learn things is to explain it to others. That can be done in multiple ways, but Edu-LARPs are one such scenario where you can explain what you learned to others and even try to convince them that you are right in this position.

And the great thing is you don’t have to actually agree with the point yourself. You can just assume this position. So you are not personally at stake. You can even play arrogantly—convinced that you're right—and play the game that way.

James Clasper: And "play" is the operative word here, isn’t it? Because it is critical that there's a kind of a game to it or that it’s fun—or both. Is that what underpins it all? The idea that you're breaking the mold of how to educate and how to learn? Saying, “Sitting down in a classroom is not for everyone,” “Being talked to by a pedagogue, by a teacher, is not for everyone.” That having this more discursive, engaging, and, as I said, fun way of learning is actually a much better way of passing on information and knowledge and facts—but also problem-solving and communication and public speaking skills and so forth?

Mathias Granum: Yeah, I might not be so black and white in that. I mean, when we started the school, I was convinced that play was the far superior way of teaching. And we were telling ourselves things like: How do children learn to walk? They learn not because a teacher tells them to do it, but because they play. They practice. They make mistakes. They correct the errors.

How do children learn to speak their native language? Through play. Play with words. Pretending they can speak and then doing it.

But what we didn’t realize at the beginning when we started EPOS is that learning grammar or math is quite different from learning how to speak your native tongue.

So what we learned at EPOS was we couldn’t teach everything equally efficiently through play. So we ended up with a structure where we have one week a month that’s an Edu-LARP, where we have this overarching narrative and playful activities and we are in costumes and so on. But the other three weeks every month are more similar to other schools in that we have classroom teaching.

Students know that at 9:30 Monday morning I have physics, and so on. We might still have some elements of play in that regular teaching, but it is still classroom teaching. That’s a focus on the teacher conveying information to the students. There’s also some value in—well, it sounds boring and not very sexy—but habits, structure, knowing what to expect. It’s kind of like yin and yang. The two things need to counterbalance.

And having three weeks of structure makes it easier to then look forward to the next role-playing game, prepare your costume, and get hyped.

James Clasper: What’s your background in, and how did you get into role play and LARPing in particular?

Mathias Granum: Well, my personal story is that I played role-playing games with my older brothers when I was a kid. Then, as an adult, I became a teacher at a theatre school. And we started doing role-playing weekends at this theatre school. And at some point, my colleagues asked me if I wanted to do a role-playing summer camp at the school.

It was a place for teenagers who just loved fantasy role-playing games—where you're sitting down by a table with miniatures and rolling dice and so on. I had so much fun doing that. Then we continued doing these camps at the school for some time.

And after some time, other games started appearing at these role-playing camps. I remember once there was a participant who asked me, “Can I do a churchyard game tonight?”

At this camp, both the organizers and the participants could offer their role-playing games. I imagined "churchyard" was something like a horror game taking place in a haunted churchyard with skeletons and ghosts and so on.

But then, in the evening, during dinner, when students could offer activities, he said that he would offer this game based on the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

And it doesn’t work in English, but "Kirkegård" in Danish means churchyard.

James Clasper: Yeah.

Mathias Granum: So it wasn’t a horror game about ghosts. It was a game about a 19th-century Danish philosopher. And we weren’t playing Indiana Jones characters, but Søren Kierkegaard’s existential archetypes.

So I joined the game to see what he was up to. And then he passed out little handouts that described Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. I can’t really translate these archetypes, but they were something like the hedonistic person, and the authoritative person who does what he’s expected to, and so on.

And then we were playing a group of friends in modern-day Denmark on holiday. And we were given different dilemmas, different problems to solve, as our existential personality types. It was quite sophisticated, and I felt I learned a lot about philosophy from this game—things I can still remember now, 12 years later. Our brain just remembers story a lot better than facts that are separate from a context.

And then I talked to his mother later—this game master’s mother—and she said, “That’s interesting, because at school this guy doesn’t do homework very often. He’s bored in school.” But this game—he had obviously spent lots of time preparing and reading up on the theory.

I thought to myself: What if we made a school for this kind of student, where they have a lot of freedom and opportunity to go crazy and even teach each other, like he did? How much could students learn if we taught this way?

And I had other similar experiences, where we did political negotiation role-playing games. Some in a fantasy setting. But some games were in a modern-day Danish political setting, where players were not playing kings or queens, but leaders of a Danish political party discussing how to spend the budget next year.

And I found that these games were just as engaging for the participants as the Game of Thrones kinds of fantasy games. So again, I thought, if we took this energy from the camps and channeled it into a school setting, how much could the students learn?

And that’s what sparked the idea of creating the efterskole in EPOS.

James Clasper: Amazing story. What does EPOS stand for?

Mathias Granum: The Greek word for an epic. It’s where “epic” comes from. “Epic” is derived from the word epos—the word for an epic myth.

James Clasper: And then what happened? I mean, how easy is it to set up a school like that? And what was the reaction when you said this is the type of school it’s going to be?

Mathias Granum: It was kind of a coincidence. One day a mother came to pick up her two sons from the camp, and then she said kind of casually that, by the way, did you know that you can buy a boarding school building for the same price as a normal family house here in Denmark?

In fact, you can buy a whole boarding school complex plus the headmaster’s family house for the same price as a family house. I came home that night and told my girlfriend—now wife—about this, and she said immediately, “Let’s do it.” And two years later, we opened an efterskole in EPOS with 68 students.

The reactions were very positive. We had our camp participants talking very positively about this idea—loving the camp—and many signed up for the school before we even had the buildings, because they wanted to attend a school with this kind of playful energy. And we far surpassed the number of students that the bank set as a minimum.

They said minimum 40 students, and we started with 68. So it was a huge sense of updrift. Even the local people here in the village where the school buildings are—although they didn’t know anything about role-playing games except for the stereotypes—they were happy to support the project and volunteer in various ways setting up the school.

James Clasper: You talked before about how, when you went into it and began the school, you wanted to do learning through play. It sounds like over the course of 10 years that’s changed—and that you’ve modified your views about the extent to which it can be used or in what context it can be used. How did that development occur? What were the tipping points where you said, “Hold on a minute. I’ve kind of changed my mind about this”?

Mathias Granum: I think we had some of the milestones—some of the great learnings—already in the very first year.

In the first weeks of the school year, we had what most boarding schools know as the “honeymoon” of the school year—the first weeks, or maybe the first months actually—where you can kind of run on the same energy that I knew from the camps. Everyone is excited. No one wants to miss out on anything.

But then at some point in all schools, it becomes October and November. It starts raining. Maybe you fell in love and you broke up. And all of a sudden, it’s hard to feel super playful Monday morning at 8:30. That’s a problem of scale. You can’t just scale up what you do at a role-playing camp and make it fill out a whole year.

So we learned that the hard way. The first year, in the beginning, we were so busy and so excited—we as teachers—about designing Edu-LARPs that we didn’t really bother with the minor details like structure and order or having a protocol.

I think we even were telling ourselves that it would be an insult to our students and ourselves to have a protocol and check if the students were actually there. Because—our teaching is so great—they will want to be there. And if a student or two takes a break, why not let them? They know best if they need a break.

What happened gradually was that more and more students, over the fall, drifted away from the teaching. And I had never seen that happening at camps. It was a new phenomenon.

And we were sitting at our meeting discussing: So how are the students doing?

And at some point, someone said, “So how about… let’s say Michael. How’s he doing?” And we were looking at each other. “Well, Michael… I don’t really know. Isn’t he in your class?” “No, he’s not in my class.”

And we checked our lists and discovered, “Well, okay, he’s my class, but I didn’t see him almost ever. And he didn’t show up at our last three Edu-LARPs.”

So we discovered that giving students lots of freedom—which is kind of inherent in role-playing teaching—works really well for, let’s say, two-thirds of the students. But some students need the structure to stay hooked. So we reinvented the protocol and other measures to make sure the students came up in the morning and were ready for school and for the LARPs.

James Clasper: And what’s the student body like?

Mathias Granum: Well, the typical student is a nerd. And here, nerd is a positive word. They use it themselves about themselves. A nerd is someone who is passionate about his or her interests and doesn’t feel a necessity to conform to standards. They are proud of being role-players or co-players—or the other profiles we have at our school.

I mean, we have a mixture. Some students come to our school because they didn’t thrive at their regular school. Some come because they were bored at the regular secondary school and wanted more challenge and more freedom—like the guy I told you about, who felt homework was boring, but he could spend hours reading Danish philosophy and making his own game about it.

James Clasper: And they’re still being graded, I guess, as part of the Danish school system and curriculum?

Mathias Granum: Yes.

James Clasper: So how do they fare? I guess there are some that, as you say, are bored at school—at regular school—and struggling a bit. What’s the consequence that you’ve seen over 10 years of what happens when they come and spend a year or two or three with you?

Mathias Granum: The latest results were a bit better than the average. So nothing out of the charts, but solid, good results.

But I think the main results of this kind of teaching are not measured on the normal scale. It’s the kind of results we see on the last day of school, when we have an open microphone and students can step up and speak to each other and to the teachers and parents.

So it’s a group of 200 people sitting there on the last day. And some students stand up and say, “One year ago I didn’t dare speak in front of my class of 20. And here I am speaking in front of 200 people.”

And that’s the stories we get from parents—that they’re really touched to see this development. So I think that’s where the real value of this kind of teaching shows up.

James Clasper: You must be full of stories of aha moments—where you see kids who, as you say, whether it’s public speaking and being unafraid to stand up in front of hundreds or other aspects of their development—you kind of see what happens in real time. Suddenly a transformation, or a moment when something becomes understood or easier, or whatever it is, right?

Mathias Granum: Mm-hmm.

James Clasper: You must be full of stories like that.

Mathias Granum: Yeah. For instance, if we take this game, The Settlers of Storm Island, that I mentioned earlier—with the five cultures settling on the same island and trying to build a society that can bridge the ethnic and cultural differences.

In this game, we sometimes try to simulate political division. So we ask the organizers to increase the political tension throughout the game—to simulate what we see in many places in society, with the United States as a strong case for that.

And we simulate that in a fantasy setting. One of my really powerful aha or Eureka moments was when one of our very young participants—this was in a weekend game, so we had guests from outside—during this community meeting, we were like 80 role players in this fantasy parliament. And the debate was getting heated and personal and unconstructive.

There was this girl who was in the sixth grade—so around 11 years old at the time. Suddenly she shouts at the top of her lungs, “Can’t you see? You are ruining our society with your constant bickering!”

And everyone fell silent. And this young girl was then elected as governor of the island. And she made peace and had people listen to each other once again.

And that’s the kind of situation we can’t plan. Because this was a player initiative. We could set it up by creating conflict, but it’s up to the players themselves to figure out how they’ll resolve the conflicts.

James Clasper: So broadly speaking, what skills—whether that’s academic, social, or emotional—do students develop through this method of teaching that might be harder in a more traditional setting or classroom?

Mathias Granum: What Edu-LARP excels at is training 21st-century skills. And when I say “training,” it’s because we don’t actually teach them. But it’s really training the skills—and that’s what the game is so good at. Because you’re actually there.

Let’s say you are playing an ambassador who represents the rights of a certain species. We did that in a biology Edu-LARP. So you are there representing the oak, and learning all you can about the oak. You practice a lot of communication and conflict resolution skills when you argue with others: What should be the rights of this oak? What do I need for my oak to flourish?

You learn to compromise and so on. So: communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, creativity, critical thinking—21st-century skills are taught quite efficiently through Edu-LARPs.

James Clasper: These are skills that today—when you can get the answer to anything on your smartphone or ChatGPT or something similar—these skills are really what we all need, right?

Mathias Granum: Yes. And I think for me, my personal journey has been to acknowledge that knowledge is also important—not just skills.

Because in the beginning, in my most idealistic phase, I would say things like, “You don’t need to know stuff like the order of kings. You can easily look that up. Here, we will focus on communication and collaboration and all these skills.”

And although it’s true that you can look up facts, what I’ve come to see over the years is that to do really creative work—and to think critically—you need lots of facts and knowledge and basic skills to think critically with.

So it’s like the two wings of a bird. You need both.

If I ask my students to go out and have a role-playing debate about the pros and cons of nuclear energy, that debate might be very fun and engaging. But they might not learn a lot academically from it if I don’t first make sure that I also give them a solid academic foundation for that discussion.

Play is great for engagement. But you need to couple that with actual teaching to make sure—if you want it to be academic. I mean, you can have lots of unsupervised play. I think that’s wonderful for kids and youth to do that. But to make it academic—to give it an academic direction—you need teaching as well.

James Clasper: That makes a lot of sense. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in implementing this model, and how have you overcome them?

Mathias Granum: Well, one challenge we faced was that we believed so much in the playfulness and the creativity that we overlooked the importance of structure and clear frameworks.

So for instance, let’s say in a game I want to teach the students about different political ideologies and economic concepts. I might tell the students, “You eight—you are a nation. And this nation is capitalist. And it has elements of, let’s say, meritocracy. Now go out, in a group format, and research: What does capitalism and meritocracy mean? And then develop your own nation and your culture based on these premises. You have one and a half hours to do that. I’m here—call me if you need my help.”

That was how I would teach in the beginning—thinking that learning would thrive with this amount of freedom. But what I learned was that this worked for maybe 30% of the most eager and mature students. But in some groups, they would sit down, and they would look at each other and say, “Okay, so what was the task again?” And one would say, “Something with capitalism?” “What is capitalism?” “Well, that’s what they have in the United States.” And they would all agree: now they know what capitalism is. And they’d say, “Okay, let’s go and find costumes.”

I’m exaggerating a little bit, but the point is that in this very open, inquiry-based learning setting, things can easily become superficial. And as soon as one student says, “Okay, that’s enough, let’s go and find the costumes,” it’s very hard to be the one student who says, “Well, can we go a bit deeper into this theoretical concept?”

So if you want students to really learn all the aspects—different versions of capitalism, what is the free market, how is it different from planned economy, and so on—that can be quite difficult for students to learn in a group setting with eight students and eight computers doing their own research.

So we learned to highly structure these processes. We can still have elements of freedom and play, but we would put a framework around it. We would first teach the students: What does good group work look like? We would ask them to select a leader of the group and someone to track time, and have different roles assigned so they all know: What is my role in this group?

And then, instead of giving them one and a half hours, we would maybe give them half an hour—so shorter time and with a more structured agenda. So they knew what was expected of them.

James Clasper: Can you tell me how you’ve been thinking about how this model of teaching might work in other contexts—traditional Danish schools, schools in other countries, etc.?

Mathias Granum: This might not be the answer that one would expect from me, but I would be quite cautious recommending doing lots of gamification in primary or secondary school.

In fact, I see a lot of gamification being practiced right now in the Danish school in ways that make me cringe a bit. For instance, let’s say a teacher has difficulty—the students don’t seem very engaged and there’s a lot of noise in the class. So she tries to solve it with some gamification.

She tells the students, “Go out in groups of four and design your own board game on human rights.” I mean, this sounds great. It sounds fun and playful, and everyone loves board games. It’s collaborative and 21st-century skills and all that.

But what usually happens is that these students go out in groups and don’t really know what to do. Some start playing computer games. It’s hard for them to take it seriously. And even if they take it seriously, they might end up spending a lot of time decorating the board—and not learning a lot about human rights.

So that’s how I unfortunately see gamification being used a lot in the Danish school system right now.

If I had a magic wand, I think I would use role-playing games and simulations to train teachers—to teach effective classroom management. Because I think classroom management comes first. And that’s a really difficult task in itself. And adding the level of gamification just makes it more difficult.

James Clasper: So you're talking about having an Edu-LARP for teachers themselves?

Mathias Granum: Yes. Training Edu-LARP on how to manage 25 unruly kids. Yes. Because what role-playing is really good at is when you practice the exact situation that you want to learn about. So if you're a doctor and want to learn about first aid, it’s good to have a role-playing game about first aid. And if you're a teacher and want to learn how to manage classroom behavior, a role-playing game is really good at that.

James Clasper: Am I right in thinking that you’ve also visited Britain’s strictest school? Tell me about that. Why did you visit, and what did you learn?

Mathias Granum: So this is my tenth year at the efterskole in EPOS. So I took the opportunity to take some months’ leave this winter to write a book about pedagogy—about what I learned from efterskole in EPOS, from the experiments that worked and the things that didn’t work, and then how we corrected our mistakes.

Then I thought it would be interesting to visit the apparently complete opposite of EPOS. Because we are a very free school—play-led activities. So what about visiting the strictest school in Britain?

I went there this winter to see it for myself. The interesting thing is this school has incredible results in terms of lifting students. It’s not an expensive private school for the upper class. Rather, it’s an inner-city school with a huge intake of immigrant children.

This school—for three years in a row—has been the school in Britain that has scored the highest in terms of lifting students’ academic achievement. So I thought that was fascinating. And I watched a documentary, and it looked like the students actually enjoyed being there. It didn’t seem like this strict, oppressive system that one might imagine.

I visited the school and saw that what they really nailed was classroom management. I was there with my wife and my son, who attends seventh grade here in Denmark. And in his school, when the teacher asks a question, very few students raise their hand. Sometimes no one does. And it’s almost embarrassing. The teacher asks again—a very simple question—and still no one raises their hand. The students themselves are embarrassed to speak up, because they don’t want to be seen as the nerd or the teacher’s pet.

So what I saw at the Michaela Community School was classes where all the students—and I mean literally all students—raised their hand and took active part in all the lessons. Because they had such a strong culture around that.

So yeah, I was impressed. They did the opposite of what we did the first year at EPOS. We gave absolute freedom and then had to adjust and find a good middle ground. They have structures in place to ensure that the classroom is safe and orderly and no one is being bullied for being attentive. And they have these remarkable results.

James Clasper: It’s fascinating. Tell me what you think your school has learned from them—and what potentially they’ve learned from you.

Mathias Granum: This school confirmed some of the lessons I learned the hard way in the first year at EPOS: that play and structure need to go hand in hand for it to not just become chaos.

Now I'm practicing how to conduct my classes in a way so all students actually participate. It’s such a crucial thing. You can have the best teaching, the best LARPs, the best gamified lessons—but if, say, 20% of the students don’t take part, that benefit will be zero from what you do.

That’s a real nut to crack. And it seems like they cracked it at Michaela Community School.

James Clasper: Alright, last question. We’ve talked a lot about the last 10 years of EPOS. What do you hope for the next 10 years?

Mathias Granum: Yeah, good question. I think we have developed some methods now that really work. The first years were chaotic, and we had to reinvent ourselves a lot.

Now, to be honest, I’m enjoying the stability that comes from someone who has started a school that was so chaotic in the beginning—and now we’ve actually found some routines that work. And we have role-playing games that work.

Maybe for me personally, the journey could be toward: How do we make sure that we also lift those 20% of the students who—in every school, and also in our school—risk not taking part so much in the classroom?

In a normal classroom, there are always the five students who always raise their hand, and there are typically also the five students who don’t raise their hand a lot. Play can mitigate that to some extent—if done wisely. But it has to be very carefully crafted. Because play can also enhance those dynamics.

It’s very easy in a playful setting to do nothing and let others take the lead.

I think that’s the journey we are on right now, and that I hope we will continue for the next decade.

James Clasper: Mathias, that’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for telling us so much about your school and its methods and style and the challenges you face. It’s been fascinating. Thank you for being on Archipelago.

Mathias Granum: Yes, my pleasure.

James Clasper: You’ve been listening to Archipelago, produced and hosted by me, James Clasper, for Archipelago Audio.

If you enjoyed this episode, tell someone else about it. Leave a nice review and hit subscribe so you don’t miss another episode.

Next time on Archipelago, we trade fictional worlds for lived experience—moving from the role-playing games of EPOS to the real-world conversations of the Human Library, where people become books and borrowing one means having a candid conversation that could challenge your assumptions, confront your biases, and open your mind.

Ronni Abergel: We offer access to unique engagements where you can learn about yourself and about all the groups in your community that you might be a little nervous about because—hey, wait a minute—they’re not like me. They look different. They sound a little bit different. The clothing they wear is very different. Or whatever the features are that make you realize we’re not the same.

But maybe when you sit down and talk to them, you’re going to realize you’re a lot more the same than you think. Here’s an opportunity for you to unjudge someone.

James Clasper: That’s next time on Archipelago. I hope you’ll join me.