First day back at A University Outside Tokyo today. All new courses as I decided to rewrite the one course that was the same.
Anyway, I have a course for repeating students. I requested this for the challenge and thought it would give me a chance to try new things to up motivation.
15-week role-playing game based roughly on a Dungeons & Dragons-type game mechanic? Based on welcoming an exchange student? Let’s enter the dungeon.
It’s very much a Role Playing course, with a minor game put in. It’s sort of a hybrid of Daniel Brown’s EFL RPGs and James York’s Kotoba Rollers framework. The students have (electronic) portfolios to submit, which should include audio recordings of role plays, transcriptions of part of that audio, vocabulary and grammar notes.
It’s just the first week but the students seem relatively enthusiastic, especially with the 20-sided, 10-sided and 4-sided dice.
The non-player characters (exchange students, parents, etc.) are not played by a Dungeon Master (teacher) but by the students and decided by values of dice rolls. There is a bit of task planning, task recording and task reflection, as well as focus on form reactively.
I still need to work in more about the strength, courage, observation and stamina points more clearly in my mind but at least it wasn’t rejected point blank.
Read Here be (Dungeons and) Dragons future’chapters’: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Here be (Dungeons and) Dragons 1
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I think this is a great idea! Please tell us more about it and how it works out.
Thanks Kirsty. I certainly will!
20-sided dice can be relied on to amaze non-rpg people.
I actually used a D10 with my business students last week and their minds were fried.
This sounds really interesting! An nice approach to tie different activities together. I’d love to find out more about how it goes, please keep us updated