Digital play: gamify your lessons, by Graham Stanley

I have explored Graham Stanley's blog and watched a recording of his webinar Gamify your classroom. In both, Graham mentions different ways of adapting games for classroom use and he recommends several games, for which he provides lesson plans. Being a gamer myself, I found his blog and webinar very interesting.

In his webinar, Graham mentioned one occasion on which he tried to play RPGs (Role-playing Games) with students that hadn't played the genre before, and as a consequence, the activity wasn't very successful. Before trying to use games with a certain group of students, teachers should find out whether this particular group of students is used to playing games for fun. If they are, the teacher will be able to exploit the real learning potential behind playing since, as Graham says, if something is already a part of your life outside the classroom, then that will most likely motivate you if used inside the classroom.

However, in order for a game to be of help in language learning, there must be a context in the game chosen, provided by a task, and learners need to understand that they are playing the game for a pedagogical reason. This means that the teacher must be careful when designing the task; the task will be the key for meaningful language practice when playing.

Moreover, teachers should do some 'research' before trying to 'gamify' their lessons, or they may find themselves in a completely unknown world and they won't be able to take advantage of what games make students feel in order to accomplish successful language acquisition.

Tips to finding a good game

In this post, Kyle Mawer (Graham Stanley's colleague) provides tips to choose a good game to use in your lessons. Here's a summarized version:

The ideal game...

1. ... has to be seemingly simple. If the game is too complex or demands too much attention on the part of the learner, then there won't be enough time for language practice/learning.
2. ... should come packed with language. The best games are the ones that already come packed with language, such as Vortex Point, where you cannot make progress if you don't read the speech bubbles.
3. ... should have in-game pauses. These should be used for the teacher to encourage language production and for the students to produce it.
4. ... should have a gripping enough story.
5. ... should be age appropriate.
6. ... should have nice audio elements. These can enrich the students' gaming and learning experience.
7. ... should have a well-worded walkthrough. This can be difficult to find, as they are usually written by players, but fortunately for us, Kyle Mawer has set up a wiki with several walkthroughs written with an eye on language learning.
8. ... should contain some form of language. It could be spoken or written, and it could be in the game itself or in its walkthrough, but it should be present somewhere.
9. ... should be fun! Or else students won't become engaged in the activity. As Kyle says, a language task shouldn't kill the fun of a game, but rather restructure it.