Tag: games

"Are you seriously going to do that?"

Marc Jones / / Materials, Pedagogy


I’ve been experimenting with board games in the classroom, sometimes in a bit of an impromptu way.
“Seriously, Marc? Aren’t you anti-game?“
No, I’m not; I’m anti time wasting. I’m going to write a bit about things I’ve done with them below. Both, coincidentally, are by Oink Games. They are pocket sized, due to the boards being made up of chips. Both games require collaboration as well as competition, with shifts between both states. 

Troll

This is a game of guessing card values and ‘betting’ on the value in order to gain treasure. It’s simple and addictive. The game works by guessing the value of a Troll card only one player has seen and as a group being lower (or not being the individual or one of a couple of individuals that takes the total over the Troll card value) in order to win gems. 
I’ve played with children in small groups and in a big university class using teams, and this has tended to work well to encourage English use by penalising unnecessary Japanese use with a one-gem penalty. There’s a tendency to play risky but that’s the fun of the game. There’s negotiation among groups, as well as explanations of betting strategies. 

Deep Sea Adventure

This is Troll with movement and is difficult to win points from without a bit of restraint and cooperation. 
You go around the board as a diver collecting treasure but there’s an air ration, you only know the approximate value of the treasure and carrying it reduces your own movement and also reduces the air for everyone. Because of the game complexity, there is inbuilt need for communication, like “You can’t move five. You need to go back two because of your treasure.” or “you forgot to move the air meter.” My favourite utterances were a very ladylike “Oh, shit!” and “Are you seriously going to do that?” 
Never mind a deep sea adventure, it’s a deep adventure into stuff students never say to one another. 

Further reading

Rose Bard’s blog posts tagged with game-based learning.  
Japan Game Lab

Principles and Filler

Marc Jones / / Pedagogy

  Or ‘What can you do to separate the start of a lesson from the end without wasting everyone’s time and learners learning nothing‘
Before I start, I’m going to just say it: I have been a filler user. You get those days when the awesome lesson you planned seems to go awry or you or the learners just aren’t feeling it. I think the problem comes when the filler is routine or is pushing out principled, educationally beneficial activities.

Games

Games are my bugbear because games are what popular teachers without curricular responsibilities do. It is possible to play games and have learners learn but the danger is that learners end up playing Hangman or Bingo.
I have no problem with Guess Who? when giving descriptions, Clue/Cluedo when speculating, or a quick game of Bingo to practice listening to numbers, though. Also, if games look good and have learning as part of the mechanism, great. If it looks like it was a hastily photocopied pile of crap, your learners might well be merciless.
There are tons of awesome looking RPGs here. They do need more than one lesson to play them.

Free conversation

You can listen to the TEFLology podcast about FreeCon here.
As a teacher who sometimes uses a Dogme framework, I hate FreeCon. It is the last bastion of the lazy teacher. Beginners are given hangman, intermediate upward are given free conversation, unstructured and never reflected upon. Nobody takes any notes, nobody is really given any guidance. 
“But they want conversation practice!” the FreeCon teachers say.
I’d say that’s fine, but is it what the learners want or is it what the teachers want? And how about learning happening with the practice, like giving a bit of feedback, some alternatives that are appropriate for the learners? If you’re nodding, I think you might be doing FreeCon in a principled way. If you’re scowling, I bet it’s a conversation all about you.

Reading & Listening

I love listening, and I rather like reading, and these definitely need to be taught. The problem is, they are often just ‘done’. Simple questions straight from a book, only surface engagement, purely to kill time. I’m sure this could be done at home, so unless there’s a special reason for you to be there, why does this need to be done in a lesson?

Other Pet Peeves

  • Pages from Murphy’s ‘English Grammar In Use’ (guilty of past use).
  • “Translate this letter I can’t read”, regardless of appropriacy or language resources.
  • Song lyrics gap fills when the lyrics mean sod all (One Direction).