A Serious Game that students can play off class

I chose the game named "third world farmer".This game contains knowledge of different vocabulary, and can foster students' sense of mathematics. In this game, there are two adult farmers and their children, and they can give birth to newborns according to the players' will. There are several fields that players can plant different kinds of crops. But a player have to use the limited amount of money to buy some crops and plant them. When the crops have been planted, players have to click the button on the upper right side to let time goes by. One year goes by very quickly and the crops are ready to be collected. On the screen we can see the details about what happened during the year and the amount of money the we made by selling the crops. I played the game for sixteen times and I found that even though this game is simple, it can teach us a lot of knowledge. First of all, there may have some unfamiliar words to the learners, thus they will get to know the words by playing this game. Moreover, this game teaches us to balance the population and the annual income of a family, and teaches us to consider the situations of weather and the country's economy. Students can not only learn language through this game, but also can learn some skill of mathematics and whole-picture consideration. This was the first time I played it and my farm was in poor management and money became less and less. This game is not to easy to play and calls for some strategies.

Students will learn more than they can get n a classroom. Such as the decision making about what crops should plant and how many money should they spend, and even whether the two farmers can have another baby or not. This game is a kind of simulation game which teaches players about the knowledge of management.Thus, the objectives of playing this game can be learning new words relating to the farm work, as well as learning to manage and balance the expense and income.

For the words part, I shall use a simple quiz to assess their master of those new words, or let them  to write a report of their farms' benefits. For the management skills, I can see who earned the most amount of money after a certain period of time. And also, students have to write a reflection about what they have learned from this game.

Let Us "Escape The Room"

As i learned the term gamification, I knew that it has been defined in a number of different ways.

"Wiki defines Gamification as the infusion of game design techniques, game mechanics, and/or game style into anything. This definition is purposely broad to support the many uses of the word outside of the context of business." Games can be attractive and make students feel engaged, which can help them learn and practice. Games are primarily valuable due to the emotional responses they evoke and the experiences they engender in their players.Franciosi suggests that "both casual games and serious games can play arole in second language development. He states that arcade type or flashcard gameswould work well for practicing discrete subsets of skills because they tend to be repetitive andrequire players to practice isolated or very small sets of skills, and comewith the added benefit of a dynamic, computer-mediated interaction thatsupports flow. On the other hand, role play games, strategy gamesor simulations can be used to integrate skillsin holistic problem-solving activities." From his article we can learn that gamification in education is also rational and important. 

The game I played is named "The Ballard of Ketinetto 7 ".It is an "escape" game, which I found a little bit difficult and asked for patience and intelligence to perform. I played it for a long time but still cannot "escape". The learning objectives can be learning new words from the walkthroughs or learning how to write a walkthrough by playing escape games. Students are asked to play the game in pairs under the guidance of the walkthrough, and because the game itself is very interesting and engaging, students are easily get involved. As teachers, we can choose a game that has vocabulary which is relevant to the needs and level of the learners, and guide the learners to play the game step by step. A walkthrough is a step-by-step solution to the game, and I will use it either as a guidance when students are playing the game and meeting with some difficulties, or as a post-game review to help students learn the language in the walkthrough. Using images from the game can be great helpful because the images are vivid explanation about each step we should take. I will use images when showing learners what to do next. The simple way to assess weather the objectives have been meet is to give out a little quiz about what we learned on the class, perhaps it is a quiz about new vocabulary or new sentence structures.