A serious game outside the classroom

This week I tried the game called The Garbage Game. It requires players to design a garbage plan for New York City. It starts by questions about waste sorting.

 After making one choice, it will provide some statistics that relate to the decision.

After waste sorting, it also ask players to decide the way of transportations and how and where to recycle the garbage. 

I played the game twice and I got two different results. I only change one type of waste sorting and one way of transportation. The only difference is the reduce of CO2 emissions. 

I think this game helps language learners develop their reading and comprehensive ability. First, it provides a lot of instructions. To understand the game, learners need to read thoroughly. Then when making choices, it also gives learners comments. Then with the results based on the decisions made by the player, it actually shows the learners the relationships between the steps and results. 

Revised Part:

The learning objective of this game is to use meaning clues and language structure to expand vocabulary (pictures,background knowledge,context clues) (According to Michigan State Standards).

The learning objectives of this game are learning vocabularies and understanding the gist of the reading. To understand the game, learner might have to look up the vocabularies and make notes of every steps to figure out the best way to solve the problem. Thus I believe this game belongs to the problem solving according to Kyle Mawer's task types . Each step leads to a different consequence. In order to come out with the best solution, players need to analyze each step. It allows learners to improve comprehensive ability by reading and analyzing. 

I will try to adopt the game in my future classroom as a post class game when I want my students to learn and deeper understand vocabularies and the logic concerning garbage recycling and environment protection. In order to assess the game, I would have them report their plans orally to practice speaking or in written form to practice writing.

Revised Part:

I would use it as a pre-class activity to impress students with the vocabularies and then require my students to do the writing. For example, write a letter to the government to introduce your garbage plan.