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.

Why is Gamification? How to apply into language learning?

According to 7 Things You Should Know About Games and Learning, gamification refers to the dynamic games based on content of the courses that benefit future teaching and learning. The aims are to increase engagement, enhance learning and explore new models of education. Gamification means
In this article,  “Just” Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning , the author discusses the application of digital games in language learning. Digital games can not only overcome difficulties like intercultural competence and pragmatics, but also modify the learning and teaching process and influence many aspects of language acquisition. It mainly focuses on the goal, interaction, feedback, context and motivation. When involving games into classroom, we as teachers need to always keep in mind the purposes like what language point I want my students to practice. Interaction is very important. We need to make sure that students are engaged into the games. Thus we need to make the games challenging while attractive. To increase interaction, we can also have students work in groups so that they can be more confident and more willing to put effort. Another important thing for successfully conducting the digital games in learning is feedback. The digital games are very good and effective at giving feedbacks. Thus the learners can be aware of their abilities.
Also in the video Tom Chatfield: 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain, the speaker also discusses some important aspects for successfully applying games into learning. The speaker mentions the importance of breaking learning process into pieces by establishing long and short-term aims. He also talks about how other people are important during this process. Since engagement is one thing that support learning and games are considered highly involved activities, learning through games definitely will improve learning compare to other traditional classroom activities.