Serious Games as language learning

   According to Wikipedia, serious games are simulations of real-world events or processes designed for the purpose of solving a problem. Although serious games can be entertaining, their main purpose is to train or educate users, though it may have other purposes, such as marketing or advertisement. Serious game will sometimes deliberately sacrifice fun and entertainment in order to achieve a desired progress by the player. Serious games are not a game genre but a category of games with different purposes. Serious games are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education. The game that I chose is ‘The Garbage Dreams Game’ which goes inside the world of Egypt’s Zaballeen(“garbage people”). This game invites players to take on the role of the Zaballeen, who impressively recycle 80% of the trash they collect. At beginning it starts with one neighborhood, one factory, and one hungry goat. Game users have 8 months to build their recycling empire and get Cairo’s total recycling as high as they can. The users have to put any garbage they can recycle into the correct processor by clicking and dragging. Send the rest to the landfill within limited time.

   I played three times to make the cities in Egypt clean by sorting the recycling items! Also I have learned a lot such as we cannot put coffee paper cups in paper recycling. I think this game is very educational as well as authentic and I would definitely choose it as a learning tool out of the classroom. This is because the game would allow students not only to get new information but also be exposed to different people in the world and the many different ways that they live. Moreover, considering language learning, they may have many chances to be exposed to the vocabulary or phrases related to recycling while doing the game. One more interesting thing is that, although it is not focused on language learning, students might have a chance to study management because they have to manage money that they earn from recycling and time to conduct the game more successfully. 
 In my lesson, I will introduce today's topic(recycling) to students and hand out KWLS chart in pairs so that each pair can writes down what they already know, what they want to know before conducting the activity with the serious game. And then I will provide some news or articles related to the topic before students play the game. This will lead students to think about the topic but, I won't take time too much for this reading part because they might get bored. After talking about what they have read, I will group them in pairs to participate in the game. Finally, students will have time to write the rest of KWLS chart and two pairs will be a group to share their ideas. 
 To assess what they learned, I will use two task types which are problem solving and telling a story. After sharing their ideas with the chart, each group would be asked to have a presentation to summarize their ideas and this can be a way to assess their understanding by listening to their oral production. Or, teachers can ask students to write their thought about recycling and then collect their writing to assess.

※Game: The Garbage Dreams Game

※Performance Indicator - ESL.I.5-8.1.1.16:
Students apply learning strategies to acquire information and make texts comprehensible and meaningful.

Try a game as a language learning activity!

   I believe that using games a great activity for students to learn a second language because it is easy to motivate student to get involved in the activity and, finally, they encounter the lesson which a teacher would like to teach.

For example, Phantasy Quest1 was interesting! Although I complete the tasks a little, I was able to see various vocabulary with having fun! Phantasy Quest 1 is a point and click type adventure game, where you awaken to find yourself alone on a beach. Nearby is the wreck of your ship. All I need to do is that using the mouse and clicking anywhere on the game screen. Some things I can activate simply by clicking on them, while others I may have to use an item that you have collected in your inventory. From this game, teachers might pick and teach some vocabulary or make students the sentences popped up and check the walkthroughs. To complete each tasks, students have to read the sentences so I believe that this is a good way for students to be exposed to new words or sentences. Also, by making this game as a pair work, they can negotiate and talk about the tasks which would lead them to practice the speaking skill.

    Also, the name of another game I played is ‘Juiceand Fruit’ and I played the game three times. At the beginning I could not connect to language learning, however, as time goes by, I recognize the vocabulary related to a serving beverage store. So this game is to show the skills as a juice maker and serve the beverages requested by customers within a limited time. If a user achieves the specific score, the number of customer is raised. I can choose some vocabulary related to such as a type of glass, fruit flavor, various straws, strip pattern, and so on. For the teacher’s role, we can guide or give more specific instructions when teachers encounter students who are in stuck by monitoring their performance. Above all, this game is very simple and addictive so I think that students probably enjoy this game to win the higher score. And before starting this game, I can encourage students to play this game with the competition. So the student who gets the highest score will get the juice as a reward. I will definitely use a walk through for the game because it can be helpful for students to learn the game. With a walk through, I can make them guess the walk through first and then provide the answers. Also, the images from the games are very helpful and simple for students to remember the vocabulary. To assess students, I can make some pop quiz of vocabulary like filling in the blanks to check their understanding or make them engage in a cooperative activity as a writing activity to create the instructions how to play the game. One more thing as an assessment, I can provide the images of each vocabulary and play the role as a customer to make the student pick the right image from my beverage requests. 

Performance Indicator - ESL.E. PK-1.4.1.8:
Students negotiate and manage interactions to accomplish social and classroom tasks.

Game Link: Juiceand Fruit

Do you know Gamification?

Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems and increase users' self contributions.

Gamification has been studied and applied in several domains, with some of the main purposes being to engage, teach in classrooms, entertain, measure, and to improve the perceived ease of use of information systems. A review of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find positive effects from gamification. Gamification inspires students to develop competencies and skills as they focus on the activities of the game. And the game mechanics encourage students to compete against themselves, looking to reach a personal best or to satisfy their own learning goals. By participating in these types of activities, students acquire information and hone abilities while achieving interim goals that provide a clear sense of progress, rather than simply focusing on completing the course. Game mechanics reinforce the fact that failure indicates that more work is needed to master the skill or knowledge at hand.

According to Tom Chatfield, In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can transform how we engage people. We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment. We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks. We can use calculated randomness. We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together. And we can use the kind of group behaviorsthat we see evolving when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complexcooperative mechanisms. He provides a video game called EverQuest(Killing dragons) as an example to support the importance of Gamification. This is a player-developed,self-enforcing, voluntary currency, and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior. Also he emphasized that ‘engagement’ can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. But it's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games.

To use games in an L2 class, we need to consider 3 elements: commercial and educational games, to play or to design, and integration. Classroom activities using commercial games might include analysis of the game play experience targeting specific vocabulary, language functions, or cultural themes. For example, learners could be directed to keep a game journal in which they are asked to record relevant information such as characters, setting, language, and/ or reflect on their in-game choices. This experience then serves as background knowledge for other classroom activities such as speaking tasks or writing assignments. By creating goals, narratives, and content, learners must engage in the language at a level beyond that of playing the game Integration can include, for example, the use of game content as pre-writing content for a writing task or as an impetus for a classroom debate. In addition, a design task might take the place of a more traditional writing task, following the same multi-draft process to teaching writing skills and strategies.

※ References:

7 Things You Should Know About Games andLearning

Tom Chatfield: 7 Ways Games Reward theBrain

"Just Playing Games? A Look at the Useof Digital Games for Language Learning"