Educational Entertainment

A serious game, according to Wikipedia, is defined as “a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.” The Garbage Game is a telling example of this kind. Its primary goal is to come up with a plan about how to dispose garbage in NYC. In this game, the player is required to choose one out of three or four solutions for each question about how to deal with certain kind of garbage. At last, a summarization of possible results according to a plan is provided. The results varied from player to player, as shown by the pictures.

Students’ language learning would benefit from finishing this game. One patent objective is to comprehend the situation or the current question, since answering each question requires extensive reading skill. Also, after each answer has been chosen, a description resulted from the answer is provided for players. This format is educational rather than of pure entertainment. Another objective is to have the student to write a report about their own plan, using answers to each question, the descriptions afterwards, and the data in the summarization part. This game would be well adjusted to accomplish reading and writing goals in this way.

In order to see whether the objectives are achieved, the final report serves an efficient assessment. A meaningful report requires 1) the data resulted from 2) the solutions to tackle 3) each problem or issue. Of course, the premise of this job is to, by extensive reading, understand issues involved in this game, so that the player’s production would make sense.