Unit 3: Customizing Games

Unit Overview and Learning Objectives

This unit will show you how games can be modified or created either by the instructor or the students. The learning objective of this unit is for you to be able develop games specifically tailored to the subject matter as well as the students needs and interests.

You will need to complete all of the assignments listed below before you should move on to the next unit.

Preparation

For this unit, you will complete the following preparatory task - play one of the following games: madlibs, hangman, bingo, or twister.

Lecture

Madlibs, hangman, bingo, or twister. Ideally, these are four games that we all at least are passingly familiar with. Most of your students should be, as well. If not, I've included some resources for each of these games to help you become familiar with them.

1. For Mad Libs, the best way to understand the game is just to play it. Madglibs.com is a site that has some free mad libs. Click on one of the story titles. It will take you to a list of certain parts of speech for you to fill in. For instance, if it says Adjective, then you can pick any adjective you want. If you don't feel like choosing, this site will randomly generate the words for you. When all the blanks are filled in, click on the "Go Mad" button. It takes the story that it originally had and fills in the blanks with the words you choose. Read the story aloud. They are usually hilarious. For an example of a Mad Libs being played, here is a youtube video of a woman reading two of her madlibs stories.
2. Hangman is a basic vocabulary game. Here is a great instructional video from Howcast for playing the game and here is a video of some people playing hangman.
3. The next game is Bingo. You will find this Howcast instructional video very helpful in explaining how to play bingo.
4. For Twister, Howcast has another excellent video that shows you how to play. And I have found this video of a group of friends playing a very silly game of Twister.

I hope that the videos I choose for you to watch demonstrate how much fun these games can be.

One of the great things about these games is that they can be easily customized to suit your own needs.

For example, you can create your madlibs game using more specific parts of speech if you are teaching a grammar class, such as "past perfect tense of a verb" instead of just "verb." You could also require that the students use two or three vocabulary words in each madlibs game. Or simply make the story used for madlibs relevant, perhaps about a specific king for a history class. The key here is to make sure you give your students options. This is the difference between Madlibs and a short answer exam. Or, even better, have the students write essays, then have them turn their essays into a mad libs. They would need to remove some words and replace them with a prompt for a certain part of speeh. Then watch as they have particular fun going through them with their friends.

Hangman is especially useful with vocabulary words, or when teaching your students the jargon relevant to their topic. This is relevant to almost all subject areas - Geography and Social Studies, Foreign Language, Art - any subject with it's own key words that the students need to be familiar with.

Some games require a little more preparation on the instructor's part. For bingo, you would need to create the bingo cards and ensure that they are all different. However, this can be very rewarding. In a math class, for instance, you can create bingo cards with the numbers 1-25 on them. Then you would need to create mathematical statements that correspond to each of the answers. The neat thing about this is that you can use these bingo cards for basically any level of math, just by changing the mathematical statements. They can be anything from addition to derivatives to matrices, just make sure that you have one question for each answer 1-25. Or, you could have your students develop the questions. Assign each one an answer or two, or have them work in small groups with several answers, to come up with mathematical statements for each answer 1-25 using a certain function - like squares, or fraction multiplication. Bingo is not just limited to mathematics. Basically anything where you can come up with 25 separate answers, you can create bingo cards, and so forth.

Finally is twister. For this one you will need a plastic sheeting, or even an old shower curtain and some permanent markers, plus the spinner. I had a grade school teacher once who drew a giant graph on it and developed a game of twister using graphing coordinates. Imagine using the geography of Africa, anatomy of the brain, parts of the computer, virtually anything with spacial placement can be adapted to a twister game.

Discussion

Reflect on the game that you played in the preparation task. How can you modify that game, or even have your students modify them, to create games uniquely qualified for your classroom?

Create a discussion post describing how you would do so. Respond to at least two other classmates helping them to expand on their ideas.

Activities

Complete the following activities:

1. Modify the game played in the beginning of the unit to apply to the subject you teach. You can select a different game if you prefer, but you should play it, unaltered, before completing these activities.
2. Play your modified game and make sure to see if the game does require the skills and/or knowledge intended

Bringing it all Together

Create a lesson plan or classroom activity using game modification

Continue on to Unit 4: Wrap up

(Non-video) Games for Education | ETAP 623 Fall 2014 Home | Norana Cantrell's Portfolio