Let's play games!

 

Do your find language learning boring? Do you feel it's a daunting process to learn grammar and memorize vocabularies? If yes, then you should ask yourself another question -- Do you love GAMEs?

  I believe you must like games, there's ought to be one game you love to play. But what if I told you the essence of game is just like opening a million of boxes to find 15 pie? You should take a little time to watch the lecture given by Chatfield T, "7 ways game reward the brain". In his lecture, he explained that "this sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling." A game is able to make boring stuff interesting! How?

  Chatfield T provided us the functions of how games can do that. First, games are never made too difficult nor too easy for you to play, they keep you confident to play while make you feel achievement bit by bit. Players also enjoy the experience bars measuring progress, they could see

they are making progress. Second, games provide you multiple long and short tasks,people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged. Third, reward, games reward you for your achievement but don't punish failure. Fourth, feed back, through the game we could teach lesson of things that hard to touch and understand. And the last one, the element of uncertainty, games always have uncertainty to make you curious and keep on exploring.

  Isn't it amazing? What if we combine games with language learning? Can we also make language learning interesting and engaging? Sure, that's what we called gamification, "applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging."

   Let's take a look at the game pacman, one of my favorite which I played thousands of times in my life. It's a very simple games, you only need four keys to control the pacman to eat all the beans while avoid the

monsters. It's a very good way to teach kids simple expression of directions through this game. I once used this game in my teaching. An objective for me to use this game is to teach my students the basic direction words, and other basic vocabularies such as different fruits (I believe there's another version of pacman that will reward player different fruits at the end of each level). Besides, the game is a good ice-breaker for shy students to get familiar with everybody (I have to say silent kids have talent in playing games), while they can shout out and help one who was playing the game, they also improve their communication skills. Students engaged in the game very much through competing with each other, I group them into groups and set the time limitation, the group using the less time and scoring more would win. They took turns to play and the atmosphere was really exciting while I heard them shouting out in English. I think a walkthrough at the beginning of this game activity is necessary, through instructing students how to play this game and how should they effectively help each other through speaking  in the competition. As teacher, I only monitored the competition and made a free chat with them after the game as a motivator, I asked them how many monster they skilled and who scored the most and how many kinds of fruits they collected. These questions motivated their will to speak; I always found topics to connect my teaching with these game.  There're many ways to assess students' knowledge. The discussion is one of them, through the free discussion of anything happened in the game, teachers are able to know each student's level and how they find the game and how much they engaged in it. I would also use other games to assess them; let students write certain category vocabulary in groups or instruct them directions and let them raise hands and point out directions to response. The images of this game is not that clear but I think I can make use of the cartoon figure of pacman and monsters in other lessons, for example, make up story using them, which would make the story more attractive to students since they are so familiar with them.