Gamification in English Learning Classroom: Strategy Games

First of all, I am a huge fan of Big Fish Games, and I really enjoy their hidden objects game. My favorite one is The Black Cat which is adapted from Edgar Ellen Poe’s novel. Since I had read the novel before, I already knew the plot and the ending of the game. But the game treated you with delicate pictures and lifelike sound effects. I was totally attracted by its tense scenes and creepy atmosphere. As you know, hidden objects games always have a lot of vocabulary which you need to know and to pick them out from a mess picture. So you can also learn some new words. And I’m pretty sure that I learned and memorized the word “cane” from The Black Cat because it occurred several times. However, I won’t recommend this to young students for it is not free and the some of the scene is really scary.

    What I would like to introduce is Big Fish’s Games: The Dark Manor (available for PC, ipad and iphone). It is a combination of strategy game and hidden objects. The player is the heir of a ghost manor (still a little bit horrible but I think it is acceptable to high school students). The mission is to manage the manor and try to set other friendly ghosts free. The following the pictures are the scenes from my manor. And I am still a beginner (only level 2).

    If I could apply this game in the language teaching, my objectives will be:

    To enlarge student’s vocabulary: In the game, the player has to match the correct pictures with the words to move on to a new chapter of the story. So during this process, students should know the meaning of the word. If they don’t, they can look them up in dictionaries. What if they don’t want to look up the dictionary and randomly point their fingers on the screen? Don’t worry. The game itself will warn the player and pause the game for seconds. In order to check whether students are familiar with the words that occur in the game, I could make an informal quiz, and the student who has remembered most words will be awarded a prize.

    To improve writing skills in a long-term practice: The setting of the game is based on a narrative story and has a character upgrade system. In other words, the game could be played for a quite long time. Thus, I could ask my students to write a daily “management diary” which let students write down what they did in the game, how long they played the game, or what they feel about today’s game. This will help students to form a habit of writing. Although it is in the form of diary, I will focus on the grammar and content, and give them feedbacks. I think this will improve students’ writing gradually. And I could assess this objective through comparing their outputs and I’m sure I will find the improvements. (Similar as the idea in Casual Game)  

    All in all, strategy games could stimulate players’ autonomous decision-making skills and internal decisions. Thus, we can use the game to catch students’ attentions. And then the game itself will naturally stimulate the language learning process. By the way, if you are interested in this kind of hidden objects games, I am willing to recommend some to you, but the games might not be free.    

Gamification in English Learning Classroom: Casual Games

      Before introducing my idea of applying a causal game in the future classroom, I would like to talk about gamification first.

What is gamification?

      According to 7Things You Should Know About Gamification, “Gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior”. In other words, designing a language learning task in the form of a game is the gamification.

What are the benefits of using gamification in the classroom?

      To summarize the answer from Tom Chatfield, there are benefits:

      1. Easy to motivate or stimulate learners’ interests through beautiful and settings.

      2. Clear indications for measuring progress of each learner.

      3. Well-planned long-term and short-term goals for learners to achieve gradually.

      4. Positive reward (fictitious money, trophy or XP) and feedback both for the teacher and the player.

      5. Try to finish some tasks in collaborative and interactive atmosphere.

How to use gamification in the English class?

      This time, I would like to use a causal game as an example. I found a game named Happy Pets through 10Gaming Genres to Adapt in Class. Happy Pets is a webpage game operated by Facebook. It offers players a platform to adopt pets and raise them with care. Although this the first time I play this game, I could easily understand the operations and instructions within 10 minutes.

      I decide to use this game as an assist to help students to practice their writing skills. I can design a topic, such as what pets do you have, why would you choose this pet, or if you can raise a real one, will you choose another pet etc. Or just let them keep a weekly diary to report their pets’ growth. During this process, students should describe the images and explain the reasons in English which will practice their writing skills. Furthermore, since it is a game from Facebook, it would be easier for them to share their playing conditions with their friends and classmates. And Happy Pets has a system of giving gifts to others in order to finish a mission. Thus, I think this game would also enhance the communication or interaction between the classmates outside the classroom. I might not use a walk thourgh and the images from the game because Happy Pets does not contain much techniques. What the studetns need to do is to offer their pets some daily care. And although the images of the game is very cute, it is not very useful in the teaching.

      On the other hand, I could use prizes to keep students to get involved in the game and form a good habit of writing. And the prize will be given based on their writings rather than who has a higher level of the game. In this gamificationized writing task, the role of the teacher (me) is the controller and the judge. I should control students do not pay too much time on the game and judge their outputs both of the writing and the pets (outcome of the game).

      I think I could assess my learning objectives through my students production. Since I decide to make it a long-range task, I will find whether students' writing skills are improves or not by comparing their writings, and I could find out what efforts should I make to better support their writing.

      To sum up, gamification offers teachers an advanced but easy to get students involved in the language learning tasks, and it offers students opportunities for recognition and a positive attitude toward their work.

  

Twitterchat: Q&A within 128 words

       I joined a Twitterchat with the hashtag #Edtechchat. When I entered the chat room, many people were already started talking. Some of the members were new to this chat room just like me, and they tweeted a brief introduction of them.

       Before I joined his group, I thought they talked the specific techniques about applying technology in the classroom or something very academic. But later, I found that their first question of the day was about the bad weather and school. I felt a little surprised and breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t feel nervous anymore because I could say something about this topic. I studied in Buffalo where the cold weather was everyday’s fare and snowing was routine.

       However, a problem came up. The limitation of each tweet was 128 characters, which was apparently long enough for my reply. So I had to reorganize my sentence and chose shorter words instead. At first, I thought this was a little bit annoying. Why should there be a restriction on the letters? But a few seconds later, I told myself that maybe the reason why it named “tweet”, a short, high sound. And I think I could express myself clearly in short words. To be honest, it was interesting when you have to struggling with the words. Maybe I will use “words limitation” in my teaching for some writing tasks or word games. Furthermore, Twitterchat  is a good place for quick ask and quick answer. May be I could use it as a sample to make a similar Q&A responses board for my students to let them ask and answer the questions of what they have learned. And that is also convenient for me to monitor my students’ study.

       All in all, Twitterchat offers me a platform to communicate with other people who have the same or even more knowledge than me. I can always learn new things from them, and the internet tools can always bring me ideas to apply in real classroom.

Let's Tweet!

Twitter has proven itself to be an interesting and useful tool for educators around the globe. If being used appropriately in language teaching, students would learn new knowledge and have fun at the same time. The Teacher’s Guide to Twitter suggests four tips for teachers using Twitter. Briefly, they are creating it, connecting it, sharing it and keeping it.

As a future teacher, I have an idea that using Twitter to form a study group. I can give mu students four course-related topics each week. And ask students to choose their interested group. After they form the group, each member should share a link of related article and post their comments on each others’ sharing. Then appointing one student to tweet a complete review of all the members’ ideas and sharing it with the whole class. In this process, students should first searching articles,  and then selecting the appropriate one. Finally, they should write down their feelings or opinions in correct sentence structure. The main purpose of doing so is to improve students’ reading and writing skills.

I also come up with three basic rules which are inspired by 10 Twitter MistakesYou Should Avoid. Even though there are no official instructions to teach students how to use Twitter correctly, the teacher has the responsibility to remind students what they could do and they’d better not do. 1.  Do not randomly connect or share on your Twitter without concrete motivation 2. Do not provide unfounded or unreliable information on Twitter 3. Show respects to others’ sharing and comments.

To sum up, Twitter is a wonderful assistant to support teaching outside the classroom, which is convenient and low cost than many real books and teaching materials. Twitter will bring infinite benefits to both teachers and learners only if we use it reasonably.