At Albany Options School, students create a learning exercise

Immigration is no game. But students at Albany Options School created one to "experience" the challenges faced by Mexican immigrants in the 1930s.

It started with a cross-curriculum study of the book "Esperanza Rising" by Pam Munoz Ryan. Cross curriculum allows teachers to take one element, such as a book, and apply it to other aspects of instruction.

According to teacher Mark Wolfe, "Esperanza Rising," set in 1930, tells the story of Esperanza Ortega, born into a wealthy family in Aguascalientes, Mexico. After several unfortunate events, she and her mother decide to start life anew and emigrate to the United States with some of their former servants. The book chronicles Esperanza's experiences as she goes from riches in Mexico to rags in the United States.

The students read the book in four weeks while learning about the Mexican Revolution, the history of Mexican immigration to the United States, the challenges of being an emigrant, the rights of workers to protest for fair labor conditions, the factors that lead people to migrate generally, classism, racism, Ellis Island, Angel Island and historical trends in immigration to the United States.

At that time, moving to the United States was much easier than it is today.

As part of the curriculum, the students created a board game. The board is split into two sections, the United States and Mexico.

"The point of the game is to reach the last square in the United States with as much money as possible," Wolfe said. "But the real point of the game is educational."

When you cross the border, you have to convert pesos to dollars - using math for the conversions.

Then there's the creative element: Students were responsible for the pictures, words and art on the game board, and painted wooden cutouts for the game pieces. Internet research helped them.

Knowledge of some basic words in Spanish is required to play, and it helps if students remember things that happened in the book and also general facts about immigration.

For example, one card says "Move forward 4 spaces if you know the name of the immigration center in San Francisco Bay that many Asian Immigrants came to in the 1930s."

That would be Angel Island.

"Kids get frustrated that so many bad things can happen to a player," Wolfe said.

But as he reminds them, being an immigrant in the United States can be very hard and there can be many setbacks.

For example, players start with copies of their passports and birth certificates, but along the way they might draw a card saying their papers were stolen or lost. This makes it harder to stay in the United States and they might even be deported.

"Kids liked playing the game," Wolfe said. "As they played they didn't realize it but they were actually reviewing all of the key events of the book and re-learning and reinforcing a lot of the key concepts they had learned about immigration."