Gamification

Gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming contexts. “In academe, gamification typically employs elements such as points, badges, or progress bars to engage or motivate students in the learning process。” （7 Things YouShould Know About Gamification. As an ESL teacher, I personally hold that games are often more engaging than traditional classroom teaching methods. Online game genres like point-and-click, or escape-the-room are very interesting ways for students to memorize vocabulary or practice speaking and listening. Take speaking for example, I used to find that it is very difficult to engage students to speak in classroom, let alone outside classroom. One reason for thisdifficulty is that traditional speech topics like “please describe the city you live in” is quite boring. However, there are so many ways to encourage speaking with computer games. Sometimes, even the mention of a favorite game name could probably start a lively discussion in class. Anyway, who doesn’t love playing games!

Polleke’s Blue Room is one of the many escape-the-room online games which could be used in second language classroom. I played it for three times and found that it is a good one for learning some key vocabularies and practice speaking and listening. The learning objectives would be for students to grasp some key vocabularies like panel, isle, gorilla, and be able to use those vocabularies in both speaking and listening. In the beginning of the class, the teacher is supposed to list the vocabularies she/he expects students to learn. Students would be paired in two as a team. One of the students will read the walk-through firsthand and then instruct in his/her own word to the teammate  how to escape the room. The student who describes is expected to include as many key vocabularies mentioned in the beginning of the class  as possible. And of course the student who actually plays the game is expected to recognize those vocabularies at the hearing of them. In the whole process, the teacher acts like an activity facilitator and coordinator. The teacher will record the number of the key vocabularies uses by the speaker of each team and the time each team uses to escape the room. The team who uses most of the vocabularies and the team who uses the shortest time will be rewarded.