Games, Not Only for Recreation

As the development of teaching methods, games are no longer an enemy of all teachers, they can be treated as efficient assistant now. Gamification is not totally new in education area, which is defined in the article ‘7 ThingsYou Should Know About Gamification’ as: the application of game elements in nongaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.

Gamifacation being applied in classroom has many advantages. Firstly, gamification has the potential to help build connections among members of the academic community, drawing in shy students, supporting collaboration, and engendering interest in course content that students might not have otherwise explored. Secondly, gaining success in these learning games will give students sense of accomplishment, those emotional, individual and collective rewards make learning process more funny and appealing. Lastly, with the help of particular game activity, teachers could make important knowledge point more salient. The second and third point has been mentioned in the video‘7 ways games reward the brain’.

Let’s talk about concrete games that I think are beneficial for learning. One of my favorite game   genre is Escape the room, it’s not only good for language learning but also helpful for logical thinking. Also it can be used to teach different kinds of knowledge. For example, if we are aimed to teach new vocabulary within a particular area, like tools, take lighter as an example (in the real class, there will be more tools like scissor, can-opener, pliers, tweezers, magnet, magnifying glass, etc.) so the class would be designed as the following steps:
1. firstly I will put all kinds of tools in different places of classroom.
2. each students will get a handout of the instructions about how to find out the tools they need to escape the room.
3. on the handout there are the steps they should follow, for example: for the students who trying to find a lighter, they should follow something warm and bright. So the place where they could find the lighter could be by the window, where is full of sunshine.
4. after students find the lighter, they can light up a candle to look for the key in a dark corner, then they can escape the room.
As for assessing students' learning effect, I would group students into 4 to 5, and let them describe to each other how they use the tools they found to escape the room successfully. During their discussion, I would walk around and talk with them to find out their questions around this game class. After playing this game, students would not only know the names of different tools, but also how to use them. If students are too young to use those tools, which might be a little bit dangerous for them, teachers could replace real tools with pictures. Another example is using the game of escape the room to let students practice listening skill. Teachers may give the instruction or hint using particular key words or sentence structures to make students get more familiar with those grammar usages.

As for assessing whether the learning objectives had been met, it’s easy to be observed through whether the problem had been solved or directly from students’ behaviors. Thus teachers can know which part is particularly difficult for student or which part should be improved by spending more time.