However, when reading Ravi Purushotma's article, "Commentary: You're Not Studying, You're Just..." I cringe at the idea of having to play the Sims as a homework assignment for learning a language. Yes, playing The Sims is more engaging than memorizing long lists of vocabulary words and it provides a "real world" connection between the words and their images. Yet, it seems like a chore to log on and care for virtual people as they carry out tasks in a virtual world.I'm not saying don't use The Sims for language learning. I'm just reminding you to think about how some students may not like playing video games and not everyone in your class will like playing the same game. If you are interested in using gaming as a learning tool in your class, it might help to ask the students to find games that they could use (or modify and use) to improve their own language skills. Or, maybe ask students to design their own games as part of the class. Or, better yet, turn your classroom into a game (see: "Teacher Turns Classroom into a 'Living Video Game'"). Some educators have even gone as far as turning a school into a gaming environment (see: The Quest School).
ha ha !
ReplyDeleteThis article was my first introduction to The Sims. It also sounded to me like a particularly ridiculous video game. We have to deal with buying stuff, finances, etc. in our daily life and it is rather a bore, why would we want to do it for fun in a video game? I guess you have more resources in the game, so perhaps it is kind of fun to imagine what you would do with more than you have now, but I don't think it is for me. The difficulty of letting students find their own games is that the vocab etc. they would be practicing with would be different depending on the game. It might be hard to use what they've learned in the classroom if all students aren't doing the same thing. But perhaps if they could introduce several games to the class and then have the class vote on which one to use, that might work. But I actually wouldn't want to force video game playing on anyone. I think if I were to implement games, they would be just one choice out of several extra activities.