My Experience Using Games for Teaching English

From Hangman to Kahoot!

In my previous post, I discussed some qualities of games that have many in the educational and training field excited about their potential use in educational settings. In this post, I’ll be talking about how I’ve tried to integrate games – and elements of gaming – into my teaching practice.

Since my first days of teaching English in the village of Kiskunmajsa, Hungary, where I had no teaching tools except a blackboard and chalk (no textbook, no computer), I’ve been using games as teaching tools. When I was starting out, Hangman was a weekly favorite for reviewing vocabulary.

I was always surprised at how engaged students would get in a few rounds of Hangman at the end of the week. What made such a rudimentary game so enjoyable? Perhaps it was because our weekly Hangman-based review was one of many “playful activities” that appeal to learners of any age because of their basic game elements: competition, goals, rules, challenge, and fantasy (Charsky, 2010, p. 178). Yes, fantasy … No one actually gets hanged!

When I found myself in a teaching situation several years later in which students had regular Internet access inside and outside the classroom, I started using digital games like those still found on the ManyThings website for English language learners. These were “playful activities” that helped reinforce basic spelling, pronunciation, and grammar concepts. And far more recently, I have been using Kahoot! to design simple review games. Kahoot! allows teachers to design quizzes and surveys online that students can play on their smartphones. Students get into it once they get the hang of it.

From analog to digital, the games mentioned above have one thing in common: “Any content can be superimposed on top” of the fantasy world created by the game’s rules and goals (Rieber, 1996, p. 50). Rieber refers to these games as exogenous fantasies. In other words, exogenous games are purely formal, so any content for the game must be provided by the user. These games are widespread in educational contexts because they are easy to make and somewhat more engaging than giving learners worksheets. However, educators interested in taking advantage of more powerful aspects of gameplay often decry these types of games (Ochsner, Ramirez, & Steinkuehler, 2015).

‘Serious’ Online Games

Rieber (1996) labels games that “weave the content into the game” endogenous (p. 50). As the word suggests, as opposed to exogenous games, which lack their own content, endogenous games supply the content within the games themselves. If learners are intrigued by the content, then an endogenous game can be far more absorbing and motivating than an exogenous game.

About ten years ago, I started experimenting in classroom settings with so-called serious online games, endogenous games that I felt had the potential to engage students by virtue of their content – as well as their playful elements. Serious games emerged in the early 2000s as a term for games that were being designed primarily for non-entertainment purposes (de Freitas, 2018). This is not to say that serious games are not supposed to be fun. In fact, as de Freitas points out, one of the main challenges in designing serious games is trying to figure out “how to balance entertainment principles of fun with instructional design” (p. 76).

A few of the serious online games I tried using in classes were:

• 3^rd World Farmer
• Blast Off Game
• Garbage Dreams
• The Trade Ruler Game
• Who Wants to Live a Million Years?

I created vocabulary worksheets, reading comprehension exercises, and extension activities to accompany these games and others and tried them out in classes. What I found is that while these games generally interested learners due to their play elements, and may even have taught them something, it was very difficult to integrate the games into courses. My frustrations with using games in the classroom are consistent with de Freitas’ (2018) review of educational games research, in which she discerned that “finding the balance between game playability and fun and solid learning design that aligns outcomes with assessments (in-game or as part of the blended experience) is a key challenge for effective educational game design” (p. 80).

Another problem is that all these game are Flash-based and will stop working in 2020! (But that, perhaps, is a topic for another post….)