Games in classroom? Yes, it’s for learning!

For this part, I am so happy to talk about my own experience before. I like to play all kinds of games, like most of the players, I think it’s very good way to get relaxed and at the same time to obtain the sense of achievement when you conquered one difficult obstacle. When I was preparing for the exam of TOEFL, I only had 3 months to study for it which always made me feel nervous, so that’s when I wanted to play games to get calm down. At that time I found some good strategy games designed by Big Fish game company (actually I am a big fan of Big Fish games, sometimes I even pay to get the full version), all of which had very fantastic scenes. Also by playing these games I’ve learned lots of new words, because they had many levels to let you find the listed things in a messy picture.

By connecting the pictures with the words, I could remember them much easier, like the words caterpillar, rifle and many things in daily life that I didn’t know how to say in English. The games I used to play were: HiddenExpedition: Titanic, Azada, Hidden Expedition: Everest, PuppetShow: Mystery ofJoyville, Awakening: The Dreamless Castle, Drawn: The Painted Tower, HiddenExpedition: Amazon, Hidden in Time: Mirror Mirror, Hidden Mysteries - CivilWar, Awakening: Moonfell Wood, Secret Mission: The Forgotten Island, HauntedManor: Lord of Mirrors, etc.

My objectives for playing these games were to memorize vocabulary, and sometimes I can also practice listening through the narrative of the story background. I think the learning result was good, because it involves repetition of finding same things in different levels, then you could practice new words more times and finally build the connections of words and pictures in your mind.

If I use one of these games in my future classroom, I would choose Titanic, the following is my teaching plan:
1. Before playing this game, I would introduce the background knowledge of Titanic, the history of the event, so that students will learn vocabulary within relevant context.
2. The theme of this game is to find things according to the list in each picture, so in this step I would group students into 4, and each group will get a different picture and a different list.
3 To avoid students tapping things randomly, each group will receive a blank form to write down the things they find and give their explanation of each word.
4 To make this game more challenging, they would finish the task under limited time, so by the end of the game, there would be a winner team.
5 After this game, teacher would collect all the forms in order to find out difficult words and wrong words, so that in the following class teacher could pay more attention in teaching those words.
This game could be applied repetedly until students master all the words in this game. To assess students' learning effect, students could be asked to write a short description of a particular picture by using all the words listed below as shown in the picture.