Reading: the fundamentals

Most reading material can be divided into fiction and non-fiction.  Many people explain the difference bewteen the two as the difference between "true" or "not true", but that misses the point.

The point of reading fiction is to develop emotional intelligence by relating to the characters and the situation.
The point of reading non-fiction is to develop critical thinking skills to separate truth from, well, b.s.  But it doesn't stop there, because even factually correct non-fiction can further be subdivided into objective fact and opinion.  And of course, as we know, there is no such thing as "objective fact": everybody has points of view, if not outright biases, and we have to be able to suss them out in order to have opinions of our own.  Sometimes the only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is who is writing the story.

And that's why we have to teach our kids to read.

Poems and songs: the fundamentals

If pictures create words in your mind, then words create pictures in your mind.  The difference between poetry and prose is that when we use prose (that is, plain spoken or written language) we attempt to put a complete picture in someone else's head, whereas poetry puts only the most emotionally impacting part of a picture in your head.

Example of prose:
I have a white dog.  She's of husky descent, big with straight ears, a bushy tail and blue eyes. 
You will never have exactly the same image when you read these words as I have when writing them, but it's close enough.

Example of poetry:
My love is like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June. - Robert Burns
This gives you an image of love in your mind, but it's up to you to interpret it. 

Two weeks in a Virginia jail
For my lover
For my lover - Tracy Chapman
This gives you a different image of love.  Do you think it's uglier one or a sweeter one?  Why?

Using pictures: the fundamentals

"Innovation is only bound by a failure to see the fundamental principles."  I keep coming back to Katie Salen's quote, especially when people accuse me of being creative. 

Right now I'm teaching a course on using didactic material and I was asked to do a lesson on how to use pictures, so let's see what pictures are...fundamentally.

Pictures are either drawn or real (photos).  These are not  absolute categories, but rather ends of a spectrum; before the invention of the camera, the job of a good artist was to make pictures that were as lifelike as possible.
Pictures are either still or animated (think movies and cartoons), although a series of stills can tell a story as in comics.
Pictures are either representative or abstract.  These are also malleable categories: think of children's drawings which are meant to be representative, but sometimes it's hard to tell of what.
Pictures show nouns (people, places, thing, animals), verbs (action verbs or stative verbs), adjectives and adverbs. 
Through these parts of speech, they can represent concepts.  For example, peace can be represented by a picture of a dove or a person doing yoga.  War can be represented by a soldier running or a gun firing.

With these basic concpets in mind, let's look at three activies for exploring how we can use pictures.

The first is part of speech snap: each student draws about 12  separate pictures on cards representing nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs (stick figures will do).  They play snap by turning over their cards at the same time and yelling "snap" if they match.  For example, a dog and ice-cream are both nouns.  However, there might be some overlap: for example a dog running and a person eating ice-cream can represent either nouns (dog, person) or verbs (running, eating) or even adjectives (loud, delicious).  Therefore the winner would be the first to yell "snap" and justify why.  That player can then take all of the cards on the table.  The game ends when there are no more cards to play and the winner is the one with the most.

The second activity focusses on pulling the parts of speech into a narrative, in other words byusing pictures to enhance a story.  There are two ways to do this: focussing on the story itself and using the pictures to illustrate it, and focussing beyond the story, for example, finding pictures of the character as he or she might have looked as a young child, or of the house the character might have grown up in, or even pictures of the character's favourite drink.

The third focusses on compling these nouns and verbs into a system by showing the relationships between them.  For example, a collage about bullying would focus on the different points of view of the aggressor, the victim, the bystanders, perhaps the teachers or authorities, as well as focussing on the links between all of these people and the causes and effects of bullying.  (Part of this idea comes from Quest to Learn Systems Thinking Design Pack which can be found at http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/q-design-packs/q-systems-thinking-design-pack/)

Recipe: how to create a game

I actually have no idea what the recipe is, but I'm hoping that if I keep designing games I'll start to see patterns in what does and doesn't work. 

So far I have the following things a game needs:

• A clear end point:  If the game doesn't have a goal or a winning state to work towards, then it's hard to find the motivation to keep playing.  This doesn't necessarily mean that one player beats the others, it could mean that the whole group achieves the aim, but there has to be a clear moment when the students can say "finished teacher!" and prove it.
• To be replayable: The essence of learning is repetition and the best games make you want to play over andf over again
• To involve creative decision making: a game is usually replayable when there are many possible ways it can end, which means that every turn should see a player making a creavtive decision based on many possible options available. 
• To be playable for multiple levels of learners at once: since any group of EFL learners is by definition going to be composed of students with different strengths and weaknesses, a game will only really be possible if both strong and weak can play enjoyably and successfully together.  Adding the element of creative decision-making will help with this because each player can make choices based on their own level of understanding.
• To have simple instructions: If the instructions are so complicated the players don't know what to do, the game can't be played no matter how brilliant the original design.

Any other key points?

Game: understanding story characters

One of the reasons we read great literature is to explore the characters.

This is a card game with the cards made (of course!) by the students themselves.  Each card describes a characteristic that is not directly attributed to characters in the story, for example:

• run away from home
• date a woman like Beyonce
• listen to heavy metal music
• own a car

The idea is to get 5-of-a-kind in one of the following combinations:
1. all "WOULDs" (ex: Romeo would own a car, Mercutio would date Beyonce etc)
OR
2. all "WOULDN'Ts" (ex: Juliet wouldn't run away from home, Benvolio wouldn't listen to heavy metal music)
OR
3. all attributes that could possibly belong the same character (ex: Mercutio wouldn't run away from home, Mercutio would date a woman like Beyonce, Mercutio wouldn't listen to heavy metal music, Mercutio would own a car)

During the game, each turn players would pick up cards from the face down deck and discard what they don't need so that they always have exactly 5 cards.  They don't talk about what they have in their hands.  The game ends when someone says "I have 5" and can justify how their cards are related.  Other players may contest their justifications, so the game ends when everyone agrees on who won. 

you can't be motivated without...

Autonomy, competence and relatedness.  Researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan say that without these three elements, instrinsic mototivation cannot exist.

If you don't feel you have autonomy, that is choice in what you do, if you feel like you're being obliged to do something by someone else and that you basically have no say in the matter,
you're not going to enjoy it much.

If you don't feel competence, if you feel like you're no good at something no matter how hard you try, you're not going to enjoy it much.

If you don't feel relatedness, if you feel like nobody cares about the work you do, if you write lovely story that only the teacher will read and only so she can cooretc the grammar,
you're not going to enjoy it much.

Put this way, school isn't something that's designed for enjoyment.  That's sad.

Let's try to give students more choice and control so that they feel autonomy.
Let's try to grade students differently so they can feel competence.
Let's try to find a use for students' work after it's been graded so they can feel relatedness.
Then they might enjoy school more.

Let's find ways to do this.  Any ideas?

Game: eat your heart out!

There are students and there are students.  Some you can tease and play with mercilessly and they'll think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread; others will go home broken hearted if you look at them wrong.  Nearly all of them forget to conjuguate verbs correctly.

I had a student who would regularly turn in amazingly creative works of fiction all without conjuguating a single verb!  Drove me nuts!  This after all was level 7 of 8.  But we got along well, so one day when he turned in a paper, I took 10 seconds to glance at it and told him "I see 8 mistakes in here.  If you can correct them in 3 minutes or less, you can have this lollipop."  I set my timer and walked away.
3 minutes later my timer went off. 
"Teacher, I can't find any mistakes!".
"Sure you can!" I said as I unwrapped the lollipop and cheerfully began to eat it myself.
The next day, I found half the number of mistakes and in 3 minutes he'd corrected them all and won his lollipop.

There are three elements in this story that show that it's about a game:
1. The obvious one: the lollipop.  The prize helps.  However, adding prizes willy-nilly does not a game make.  School itself is all about points, awards and prizes, but no-one would call it a game.
2. The arbitrary rule.  Why 3 minutes?  Why not?  Most games are fun and challenging precisely because they have arbitrary rules.  Golf, for example, is pretty silly: if you really want to put a ball in a hole in the ground, there are surely easier ways of going about it than by hitting it with a stick from a distance.
3. The sense of "evil" fun.  The student pretended to be furious when I ate the lollipop and was determined not to be bested the next time.  And the next time, he wasn't!

Game: part-of-speech snap

Snap is a simple card game for two players with each player having half the deck face-down in his or her hand.  The players draw cards and simultaneously place them face-up on the table.  If the cards match, the first player to yell "SNAP!" takes the deck and the first player to win all of the cards wins the game.
Since the game is about quickly recognising matching cards, it might be useful as a way for students to review parts of speech (nouns, verb, adjectives, adverbs etc).  In this version of the game, the players would have different words on their cards and try to see if the type of word matches.  So, cat and dog would match because they're both nouns, but cat and eat wouldn't because eat is a verb.

Do you consider yourself a "fun" or "serious" teacher?

If you're reading this blog, you mostly likely want to label yourself "fun", otherwise you wouldn't be interested in games.  But it's important to see that games aid in learning retention.  The difference simply is in whether you want to call what you're doing "gaming".

There are valid reasons for NOT using the word "game"with the students: they tend to think that games=no discipline, no learning, which is understandably an attitude most teachers do not want their learners to cultivate.  There are not many valid reasons, however, for not using games such as those described in this blog.

Two kinds of game thinking about information

Game systems basically have 2 different ways of looking at information: either some or all of it is hidden or it's all there in front of you.  Many games have elements of both.
For example, in chess, all of the pieces are there in front of both players.  I may not know what the other player is going to do, but there's nothing to stop me from guessing and anticipating because in theory I know as much as my opponent does.   Compare this with poker in which there are three ways in which information is hidden and revealed: 
1. the face-down deck on the table hides cards that no plyer has
2. the other players have cards that I can't see
3. the other players try to misdirect me and feed me false information by bluffing through the way they bet

In the classroom, traditionally information is fed in by the teacher and vomited back out by the student.  A disgusting analogy to be sure, but quite true if we realise that very little of the information stays with the students after the test.  However, we can play with information in the classroom too.  For example, instead of telling the students how something works or having them read a text about it from beginning to end, we offer them a cut-up text to put in order.  This is an example of a situation where all of the information is there, but manipulating it in this way will aid retention.  Or as an example of a task with hidden information, we can cut up the text and give different pieces to different students.  Each student can only answer questions once they've gotten the information from the others.

Another way of getting information is by exploring.  Many video gamers spend a lot of time simply wandering around the game space getting to know the layout.  In fact, there is a game called Doors and Rooms where the player simply explores the space trying to figure out how to get out.  Unfortunately, true exploration requires time, which teachers just don't have much of making it difficult to tell students "go and find out about X".  A shortcut, then, is a webquest in which the teacher has preselected from 6-12 sites which the students have to visit in order to find specific information.

What are some other ways you hide or reveal information to your students?

Game: lovers' quarrel

Discourse is the study of how sentences connect in longer pieces of language such as conversations or stories.  The sentences have to connect grammatically (called cohesion) and meaningfully (called coherence).
For example:
"Where's the book?
 It (not she) is on the table (not going to dance class)"

The rules for the board game are: 
Go around the board with dice.  Before the first roll, pick up a sentence from the face-down pack. On each turn the player picks up a sentence and tries to show that it is cohesive and coherent with the previous sentence.  If successful, the player may remain on the square, if unsuccessful, the player must return to his/her previous position.  The game ends when all of the sentences are used and the winner is the player furthest ahead on the board.  Then students can compare students with other groups of players.

The sentences should be ambiguous enough that some will fit together, for example:

·         I love you.

·         Don’t go.

·         I don’t want to.

·         Have a drink.

·         Ok.

·         What did he say?

·         What did she say?

·         Where were you?

·         I won’t answer that.

·         You know the answer to that.

Can you think of others?

Game design toolkit

This link to the Institue of Play's Game Design Toolkit is a must read for anyone who's interested in designing games for their classroom:
http://www.instituteofplay.org/FDFBCBA2-4BAE-4F83-A267-B159AD44D439/FinalDownload/DownloadId-84F185B4F10451B38369C46FAA14CB28/FDFBCBA2-4BAE-4F83-A267-B159AD44D439/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IOP_QDesignPack_GamesandLearning_1.0.pdf

The first thing they say to consider are the parts of a game:

• goal: what's the end point of the game?
• challenge: contrary to popular opinion, kids like challenges.
• core mechanics: what the player has to do during the game (kick a ball, move a piece on a board etc)
• components: materials such as pen and paper or a ball
• rules: the main difference between free play and a game is the presence of rules.  If you watch kids play, half the time seems to be spent in arguing about the rules...which proves that kids love rules, especially if they have a hand in making them
• space: is this a classroom game or a playground game? etc.

One of the ideas they suggest is to take a well-known game, or a game you know well and to modify it to achieve the learning aims you want.  In yesterday's post I mentioned that I modified Dance-Dance-Revolution into a game of listening and recognising words.   Interestingly, whenever I've asked my students to invent games to practice grammar or vocabulary, very often, that's exactly what they've done, to the point of sometimes even taking a store-bought game board for Monopoly or another game and taping their own cards over the squares.  In this document they show you step by step how they made a Clue-type game to teach the metric system.

The rest of the document walks you through the process of game design and even offers templates to work from, including one for a questionnaire you can give the students after they playtest it.

The school Quest to Learn was designed entirely on the concept of game-based learning.  If they can build a whole school around this concept (while comforming to the core curriculum!) then the least we can do is make it a rule to have at least one "fun" learning activity every so often.

Game: stress maze

When I lived in Turkey I taught a group of 9-10 year old girls.  At the time, Dance-Dance-Revolution was all the rage.  I had the idea of putting words from a song ("Hello, I love you" by the Doors) on cards on the floor and having them take turns listening to the song and trying to step on the words as they heard them.

I wondered if I could do the same with stress patterns.  How's this one?

 

Consider the stress pattern in the following sentence:

GAMING IS A SYSTEM

If you follow the stress pattern noted in bold, you should be able to make your way through the maze like this:

STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED
STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED

 

Try the following sentence:

SYSTEMS HAVE INTERCONNECTING PARTS.

First identify the stress pattern, then try and find your way through the maze. 

Remember you can move in any direction as long as the next square touched the previous one.  You cannot use the same square twice.

STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
UNSTRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED
STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED
STRESSED	STRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED	STRESSED	UNSTRESSED

 

Now, make the squares bigger and place them on the floor.  You now have to walk through the maze following the same rules as above.  Make your own sentences; you may have to rearrange the squares in order to have a solution.  Then challenge your classmates and have fun!

Game: Pronunciation Poker

I was feeding my baby at 3:20am in my usual zombie state, when suddenly my brain said, "Morphology poker."
I said, "What?"
My brain said "I don't know."  Then it went back to sleep.

I've been trying to come up with games for teaching morphology which is the study of how words are put together.  Rather than opening that particular can of worms on this blog (though please ask if you do want it opened!), I thought I'd put a modifed version here called Pronunciation Poker.

To begin with, those of you who may not be familiar with basic poker rules, follow this link: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~gc00/reviews/pokerrules  Then come back here.

Now imagine, or should I say re-imagine a deck of playing cards.  Imagine each of the four suits is a word stress pattern, for example:

• hearts: two syllables, stress on the first (ex: orange)
• spades: two syllables, stress on the second (ex: hotel)
• clubs: three syllables, stress on the first (ex: pineapple)
• diamonds: three syllables, stress on the second (ex: banana)

Each card from 2-9 would have a word on it with the stress pattern corresponding to the suit.
10s are wild.
Jacks: all four suits would have a one syllable word with the /I/ sound (ex: sit)
Queens:  all four suits would have a one syllable word with the /i/ sound (ex: seat)
Kings: all four suits would have a one syllable word with the /e/ sound (ex: set)
Aces: all four suits would have a one syllable word with the /a/ sound (ex: sat)

You can have the rules above written somewhere where players can see them.  If necessary have the rules of poker handy too.

Ante up!

Child development course mission

Often at the end of a course, an exam covering all of the material is administered.  Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily help students see connections between concepts, especially if there are a lot of concepts to understand.

Child Development is a course in psychology in which you study the development of the child through time.  This led me to an interesting idea: time can be represented graphically as a timeline.  Further, the material covered includes physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development, which as I saw it made for a large map plotting out the child's development along each of the three lines in parallel through time.  Then I thought of making the map interactive.  This is done easily enough through a Prezzi presentation, but since the course is about children, I thought an interactive map should be a map you can physically interact with.  So what if the map is laid out on the floor with little flaps you can lift up, under which the students in the course have written information.  Let's say the flaps come in different shapes.  A square flap can be lifted to show a summary of the theory of that particular moment in a child's development, while a circular flap could be lifted to reveal a thought experiment.  A diamond flap would have underneath it a practical game or activity you could do to encourage the child and a rectangle would reveal pictures illusrating the different stages.

The final purpose of the map would be to invite guests: mothers of young children, teachers, other students, and anyone else who is interested.  The guests would then explore the map by literally crawling around it on their hands and knees and lifting the flaps...just like a child would!

Using games to teach game design

Most books on games use descriptions of existing or commissioned games to illustrate whatever point they're trying to make on how games are designed. 
But what if the reader were required to play their way through the book in order to understand the concepts?  After all, I give teaching workshops in which the teachers get to experience the activities themselves before I explain how and why they work.  Would the same idea be possible in a book? 
I've already written a book about lesson planning in which the reader gets to see and imagine the lessons step-by-step before seeing their rationale. 
What if I could design each of those games myself?  That's the harder challenge, for me anyway: to custom design a game that could be played in class (or visualised by the lone reader) for each concept.

Right now, the challenge I've set myself is to come up with a game to show how important emotion is in a game.  Ready to play?

Project based learning

A teacher recently asked me if after all the projects I have students do, how I then prepare a test so I can grade them. 
I thought this was a bit strage: why do I need a test to prove they can do something if they've successfully proven they can do it?  For example, I have teachers write and teach lessons, I don't then give them a test on writing and teaching lessons.
Project-based learning is basically the idea of finding a real-world task, ideally one that combines several skills such as language and math, even more ideally one that will be shared with others, even more ideally one that will make a difference in the world.

Using art to teach

It's funny how when you discover a passion you start to filter everything through that.  Mine currently is games and I'm trying to infuse all my teaching with that.  A student of mine is trying to do everything through art, so for example she taught a whole lesson on space to 2nd graders by having them do art.  She was ust here telling me about an "art enrichment" day she prepared for the primary students whereby she invited 16 different kinds of artists (dancers, singers, painters, fashion designers etc) to teach a workshop on the theme of bullying using their art form.
Whatever your passion, use it to teach.  What's yours?

Rules of Play

I've just finished reading Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.  I've found alot in there that applies to designing classroom activities, not surprising since Salen herself has found a way to apply game design to a middle school in New York called Quest to Learn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHtj6PCpyLQ).

I've distilled the ideas into 10 concepts:

1. How to define the concept of game: What's an activity? What is a core mechanic (the basic tasks students perform during an activity such as fill in the blank or guess the word)? What is meaningful play and how does choice fit into that?
2. How to design meaningful play from the students point of view
3. How to incorporate teacing into the activity rather than lecturing
4. How to show the different ways information can be given and manipulated
5. How to walk students through a task or a series of tasks so that the goals are clear
6. How to identify and deal with different types of players (including cheaters!)
7. How to adjust the activity for different types of students
8. How to create meaningful and appropriate rewards and punishments
9. How to create emergent play
10. How to connect classroom activities to culture (and possibly subvert it!)

Stay tuned as these concepts get refined and turned into courses, projects and hopefully books!

Game: GRAMMARGUMENTS

Game:GRAMMARGUMENTS

Rules:

BEFORE THE GAME AND BETWEEN GAMES:

Students “purchase” grammar cards from the teacher by writing 3 sentences using a grammar point of their choice (the selection can be limited by the teacher).  If the sentences are all correct, the teacher gives the student a card (a small piece of paper with the name of the grammar point).

GAME DAY (once a week)

NEED: each student needs a pen/pencil; each pair must have 1-2 pieces of paper; tape

The students work in groups of 2 or 3.  The teacher writes an argument on the board between two people (examples below).  The students choose their character and have 10 minutes to conduct the argument in writing: Student A writes his/her opening argument, passes the paper to Student B who responds in writing and passes the paper back.  They continue until the 10 minutes are up.

While writing, the students must have their grammar cards in front of them and incorporate the grammar points as they write.  They may repeat a grammar point but only the first instance is counted.

When the argument is over, the students must underline the grammar points they have used from their cards only.  They make also make any corrections and then tape their paper to the wall for others to read.

POINT SYSTEM:

·         For every correctly used (underlined) grammar point, the student receives +1, for each incorrect one they receive -1 and must forfeit that grammar card (they may buy the card back from the teacher by again writing 3 correct sentences).

·         Students must read every argument (posted on the wall) and award a mark to the students they think won the argument.  The student in each pair with the most marks gains an additional 2 points.

·         5 points are set aside each partial for this game.  If a student reaches 5 points, they continue to play the following week but this time for all or nothing: 1 mistake or fewer and they may keep the 5 points, 2 or more mistakes and they lose all 5 points.

EXAMPLE ARGUMENTS (if there are 3 players, the argument can be modified by adding a third character to one of the sides as indicated in brackets):

·         A teacher accuses a student (or 2) of cheating on a test

·         A teenager attempts to convince his/her parent(s) to allow him/her to use the car for a date

·         A boy accuses his girlfriend of flirting with someone else (with the other person present) (the genders may be reversed)

·         A football player argues with a referee (and a player from the opposing team) about a play

GAME DESIGN DIARY:

I started with an idea from a card game called Magic: The Gathering in which there are several thousand cards and each player builds their own deck.  I wanted students to build a deck of grammar cards by proving they knew how to use the grammar points. 

Then I got stuck wondering what students should do with the cards.  The idea I wanted was that the more cards you had, the more you could do with the language.  I began to think about situations where having more language is an advantage and came up with the idea of arguments.  Since each student learns at their own pace, they may “buy” as many or as few cards as they wish (given the number of grammar points the teacher wishes them to learn), but the more they have, the more they can use. 

I developed the point system based on two concepts: the idea that the grammar had to be right and the idea that the meaning had to be effectively used in order to win the argument.  My problem with most grammar tests is that they neglect the idea of “meaningful use of language”.  Additionally, a single, typical gap-fill exam may be more stressful and in the long run, less indicative of the students’ knowledge than a series of games.