Monthly Archives: January 2010

Storytelling – How important is it in a videogame?

Here’s a video about whether it is important for games to have a good story Suggestions on how to use it Ask your learners to think about games they know and their stories – Are the stories important? Could they be better? Get the learners to tell each other a story from a game to [...]

10 Sites for Playing With Images of Students

In September last year, we wrote about the film Gamer and featured a link to a site allowing you to create a Gamer film poster from your own photo. There are lots of other sites like this, allowing you to create altered images of yourself. Here are ten, with ideas of how you can use [...]

Ludoliteracy – a book about games in education

Ludoliteracy is a book about games in education by Jose Zagalwhich is now available as a free PDF download from Lulu . The book’s preface makes the point that games education can be surprisingly complex and that “extensive prior videogame experience often interferes with students’ abilities to reason critically and analytically about games”. Zagal suggests [...]

A split screen communication activity

One learner watches a video of the game being completed and relays the information to their partner who plays the game. Level: Intermediate+ Topic: Kitchen vocabulary Speaking Focus: Describing things in a kitchen Time: 30 minutes Game: The Great Kitchen Escape The Great kitchen escape game is a great ‘ecape the room’ game which comes [...]

Spot the difference relay writing race

Level: Intermediate+ Topic: Describing pictures Language Focus: Prepositions of place Time: 20 – 30 minutes Game: Cold window Opening screenshot to Cold Window Preparation Cut up some pieces of recycled paper into strips.  These will be used by your learners to write sentences on. Playing In a connected classroom, learners play in pairs or in [...]

A game practising ‘should’ – Tomb of the Mummy I

The Tomb of the Mummy I is a very difficult puzzle game. Because of its difficulty, it’s ideal to use it with an upper intermediate – advanced  class in a connected classroom (i.e. one with a computer & a data projector or IWB) and to use it to generate language used for hypothesis (should, conditionals, [...]

An annotated game for reading and playing

Level: Pre-intermediate Time: 30 minutes Preparation: Just before the class goes into the computer room open up two internet explorer windows.  On one window get the game ‘Hamster rescue’ ready so it’s ready to start.  In the other window open up a copy of the annotated walkthrough. Be prepared to show the class the opening [...]

Which Adjective are you?

Here’s a brief description of ten fun personality tests for your English Language Learners. They require very little preparation and I’ve included some tips on how to use them. All these games were chosen because they are free, easily accessible, engaging and fun for English Language Learners. Learners answer the test tasks to find out [...]