I kicked up this tasty bit of bullshit in 90 minutes. If anyone else gets stuck with a 'topic', feel free to steal it:
1: Where we introduce the topic, or rather why we do what we do.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to engage students in a large classroom, especially when class sizes are bursting at the seams. Some classes number in the forties. Students are growing in a globalized society that bombards them with colorful, exciting images anytime they’re outside of school. Handheld video game devices can provide convert entertainments. Plus, the guy at the front of the room doesn’t speak your language and the curriculum is, in equal turns, too easy and too difficult. Advanced students are bored, students who have fallen behind aren’t engaged and the kids in the middle might just be bored. With such large class sizes, we run into a familiar problem: How can we evaluate student progress while keeping a class relatively under control? One of the most common answers is group games.
A popular way to conduct group games is with a Powerpoint presentation. It assures that student’s attention is directed at a central point while giving teachers a lot of leeway in terms of presentation, aesthetics and engagement mechanisms. In a culture where video games rule, Powerpoint presentations can be a simple way to create a game-like atmosphere without sacrificing pedagogical goals. In this paper I’ll discuss 2 different game models and ways to tweak their various mechanisms to extend their lifespan as well as make them more effective. Afterwards, we’ll seek a kind of disclosure by revealing the fact that these games may do little more than take up time while propping up a lazy pedagogy that reinforces ‘good enough’ behaviors.
2: The Games
Blazing Pen
A typical Blazing Pen slide. The bottom text element is set to “Appear” on the first click
Blazing Pen is a game where students are challenged to unscramble a mixed up sentence containing lesson vocabulary (i.e. “woh rae uyo?” “How are you?”). They must write the unscrambled sentence on a whiteboard and then hold up the board for verification. The first team to get a correct answer gets two points, other teams get only one point for their correct answer.
When the game concept was first presented to me groups simply raised their hands and shouted out the answers. I made two significant changes to this model to raise it’s effectiveness and make scoring more equitable. The first was to introduce the whiteboards. In this way we could see if students actually had any idea what they were saying or if they grasped larger grammar and written language concepts. This also made it easier to score- In most cases 1 or 2 groups finish in advance of the others, making it easy to spot the ‘winner’. The second change was to make each person in the group take a turn writing.
When we first introduced the whiteboards and writing requirement, a problem cropped up. Often the 1 or 2 of the advanced students would do all the work while the other students simply sat around and talked. Some students were so far behind that they lacked the ability to even nominally participate. We quickly added a requirement that after every question students would have to pass the whiteboard to their left. This forced every student to participate. The effect was dramatic- Students who lacked the ability to write even simple words, who lacked a knowledge of the English alphabet, struggled, but were helped by classmates to complete the sentence. It really forced the groups to work as a team instead of letting a core group of advanced students do all of the heavy lifting, so to speak. It also evened out the scoring- By averaging out a team’s score across the aggregate of it’s team’s capabilities, it put more groups with advanced members at a disadvantage and gave equal scoring opportunities to groups with fewer advanced members.
Blazing Pen is a popular option for several reasons. One, it’s quick and simple to prepare. A teacher needs only to look in the text book or listen to the videos to generate content for the Blazing Pen. While it can be confusing to attempt to transpose a sentence into gibberish, after a couple of times it becomes second nature.
Two, it allows for a lot of variation in phrasing, which allows students to practice sentence construction and grammar. One of the difficulties of the curriculum is that it focuses very deeply on new vocabulary and simple repetition, rather than on grammar, usage and application. A game like Blazing Pen lets students create a sentence right before their eyes. Even in they’re not necessarily generating random dialog from their own expertise, it gives them a forum to explore the way sentences ‘work’; A verb goes here, that describing word goes over there, a person’s name always has a capital latter etc etc.
Three, it can be simple to adjust the difficulty in two ways. One is the more rigorous enforcement of standards for student answers. With younger students we can let a missed comma or exclamation mark slide with a warning. With older students or more acclimated students we can refuse to award points for an answer with misspelled words or missing punctuation. The other ‘knob’ we can turn for difficulty is simply to make the scrambled sentences more difficult. By adding in words students may or may not know you can force them to work as a unit to determine the origin of a word. You can also make the sentences longer or use non-standard, curriculum deviated phrases.
Four, it allows teachers to easily evaluate the progress of individual students, a luxury when classes exceed thirty students. Because each student has to take a turn writing, you can see at a glance which students need more help than others. It also allowed for the chance to help struggling students directly and encourages more advanced group members to aid less advanced group members.
In short, Blazing Pen is easy to prepare, easy to score and offers a multitude of learning opportunities. It can also be scaled to take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to police a large class and some students attempt to cede their turn to more advanced students. This requires a vigilant eye which, again, is difficult in a room of 30 or more. It can also be difficult to communicate to students that what they’re doing is wrong.
The learning quotient of Blazing Pen is also dubious. Each student spends only a small portion of the allotted time actually writing. Further, this kind of “learning by Osmosis”-style of teaching involves a lot of crossed fingers and fond wishes. We can hope that students are picking up grammar concepts but lack any comprehensive method to actually ascertain as much. Still, as far as group games goes, Blazing Pen is better than most and requires only a modest investment from the person preparing the game.
Quiz Games
A typical quiz game grid.
A typical quiz question slide in the Laser-Heart-Bomb style
Quiz Games encompass a broad swath of different styles of games with a simple play mechanic- students answer a lesson-relevant question and receive a number of points based on their answer. This flexible mechanic allows teachers to employ a large number of variations (Scoring, game play or asthetic) to keep the game fresh.
Quiz Games can require a broad up-front investment from teachers, but once a template is compiled it becomes a relatively simple affair to create a new game. A teacher needs only come up with enough questions to give every group an even number of turns. To that end, elements of other games can be employed. I’ve used Blazing Pen-style scrambles alongside multiple choice questions and simple quiz questions before. The only challenge can be extracting large numbers of questions (16+) from curriculum lessons that sometimes aren’t particularly content rich or feature redundant information; the 3rd grade curriculum is especially troublesome in this regard.
Despite the possible content limitations, a number of gameplay and scoring changes can be implemented to make the game more engaging for students. One of the most popular is called “Laser, Heart, Bomb”. In this variation, all groups start with 4 hearts. When answering a question, they receive one of 3 possible results- The laser, the heart or the bomb. The Heart will give their team an additional heart. The Bomb will make a team lose a heart. The Laser lets a team ‘shoot’ another team and cause them to lose a heart. The class dynamics are fascinating to watch. This video game-esque scoring layer gets students excited and keeps them focused throughout the game.
Another variation is the “Bomb Game”. Students answer a question as per usual and are either rewarded a random number of points or receive a “Bomb”, which clears out just their points, or a “Big Bomb”, which clears out all of the points from every team. There are usually just 1 or 2 “Big Bombs” in a game. The game becomes surprisingly uncompetitive as students seem to just enjoy the tension and surprise of seeing scores rise and fall and of feeling like their fortunes could change at any moment.
A third variation borrows from Dungeons & Dragons- it uses a ‘skill check’ before awarding points. For a lesson on body parts, students had to answer a traditional quiz question before being asked to perform a basic ‘Simon Says’ activity. If performed correctly they’d be awarded bonus points.
A fourth variation is to set-up quiz games as a board game. Students roll dice and you move physical pieces over the slide, where each space leads to a quiz question. Problems here are repeating questions, as well as scoring discrepancies and a shorter half-life for attention. These can be rectified by creating an apparatus for answering questions. Recently I created a board game with phrases like “The Monster is Behind the Princess”. Groups received a basket with paper stand-up action figures that they used to reenact the phrase.
As we can see, Quiz-style games can be very flexible and are easily altered to create entirely new styles of games, while retaining their core functions. However, quiz games are among the least effective of the Powerpoint games. Often a team can rely on a single member to answer many of the questions. Even if they’re pushed to recite the answer they’re often just ‘parroting’ and not actually using language skills. It’s also very difficult to evaluate student’s progress as a result. With this in mind it can be difficult to recommend quiz style games as little more than demonstrative tools and even then their effectiveness extends only to students who are paying attention- a rare commodity when dealing with games that typically only engage a single advanced group member.
Part 3: On the effectiveness of Powerpoint English Games
In this portion we have to face a possibly uncomfortable truth: Powerpoint English games may not be effective. In many instances they function as little more than crowd control, seeking to keep enough students busy to keep a room under control. Because of the large number of students and the “large tables” layout of many English labs, it can be difficult to break students in multiple smaller groups that allow a teacher to effectively monitor student progress and look for signs of trouble.
Of course, what would be the preferred methodology? Worksheets often demonstrate the same thing. One student does the work and surreptitiously shares his/her answers with fellow students. Even in this instance, is it possible to evaluate and return the work of 700+ students every week with all of the other duties teachers face?
In this case, I think we often follow an unfortunate but necessary course: Shoot for the middle. Get the most number of kids under your umbrella as possible. The students who are more advanced will be bored and the students who are far behind will probably fall farther behind. A good faith effort can be made to balance the scales and try to get more advanced students to help out less advanced ones, but in a class of 35 stopping to help 1 or 2 or 3 kids leaves the other 30 behind.
So while Powerpoint Games have a possibly dubious effect on student achievement, they can often help us aim for the middle in a way that worksheets and materials provided by the curriculum can’t. Even if Blazing Pen provides a student just one or two opportunities in a week to demonstrate their language skills, that’s more than they get from copying a worksheet or simply repeating phrases expressed in a textbook.
However, Powerpoint Games are easily replicated, simple to set up and can take over a large period of class time. As a result there’s a temptation to simply create one for every class period instead of spending time creating effective, engaging activities for students to participate in. It’s far easier to spend 15 minutes creating a Blazing Pen PPT than to design a shop list, design and clip fake money, explain the rules, wrangle the kids etc etc.
In the last semester I’ve started to rely far less on Powerpoint Games simply because they feel a little lazy, a little too “good enough” for me. That’s not to say I never use them- I think they definitely have a place in the classroom, but I also think they offer an easy out to teachers who feel overwhelmed, tired or just lazy. Even in an era of palm sized entertainments, students are more engaged and learn better when faced with comprehensive, more traditional exercises like practice dialogs and model role-play exercises that give them and opportunity to express themselves and impress their own personal style on the language.
In other words, Powerpoint Games are a bit of a crutch and relying on them too often robs students of valid, useful opportunities or actually practice, model and engage the language. All the talk about rules above says it best- In these types of games students are locked into a rigid universe of polarities- right and wrong, yes and no. Language is exactly the opposite. It’s a dynamic, creative exercise that requires patience, diligence and engagement. By locking student into the narrow resolutions of a PC screen we rob them of an opportunity to truly learn.
TL;DR
