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.

Gamify your language teaching process!

The term, gamification, according to “7 Things You Should Know About Gamification”, is defined as “the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.” In language teaching, the teacher uses games as pedagogical tools to achieve teaching objective. The games are engrossing enough to attract students in order to facilitate their learning process. By developing intrinsic motivation, gamification provides a systematic medium to maximize language-learning efficiency.

I never thought that games could be educational, so I started trying an “escape the room game”, named The Heart of Tota. I tried to finish it for a long time, continually clicking every single object and hoping a little progress. At last, I have to resort to its walkthrough, but at that time I lost all my patience and was exhausted. Because there is not too much vocabulary involved to finish this game, I started to think about other language learning objectives, such as communication using the target language. I would use pair work in finishing the game of this kind. By interacting with each other in target

languages, students would solve the mysterious problem cooperatively. They will scaffold and negotiate to share their ideas and the teacher, as an expert, will provide graduated hints, within their flow or comfortable zone, as defined in A Comparison of Computer Game and Language-LearningTask Design Using Flow Theory.  The major goal for students is to communicate as much as possible, so a walkthrough will not be provided explicitly. Only when they are stuck after adequate communications, the teacher would pinpoint where they are and present solutions based on its walkthrough.

The assessment of whether they have achieved the communicative objective could be impractical in that they could use body languages instead of discourse in their interactions. However, when the teacher’s advises are needed, they have to report where they are and what is the problem, by summarizing previous and current situation. In this way, the teacher could monitor their progresses in person.