Darren Elliott, who writes the great Lives of Teachers blog, recently interviewed Hayo Reinders, keynote speaker at the 4th International Wireless Ready symposium.
An Interview With Hayo Reinders from darren elliott on Vimeo.
One thing that comes out of the interview, that Hayo also mentioned in his keynote, is that existing games should be adapted, which is exactly what we are doing on Digital Play. There’s no need to try to get involved in game design – it’s too expensive and Reinders suggests adjusting existing games.
Reinders also mentions being disappointed with existing language learning games that have been produced for platforms such as the Nintendo DS. Most are not interesting or interactive and would not be motivating for students. In the abstract to his keynote, he states that “the pedagogical approach underlying such games is often not clear…the games were intended to develop fluency but in fact offer only simple spelling exercises with right-wrong answers.”
Reinders has a website, http://innovationinteaching.org/ , which has some details about the research related to gaming and language learning that Reinders is involved in:
“One of my PhD students (Sorada Wattana) and I are looking into the effects of game play on students’ Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and their actual in-game interaction. We are also looking at the effects of different types of instructions (in the form of in-game quests) on the quantity and quality of target language use“
Also on the website is an article that Reinders wrote for English Teaching Professional called ‘Using computer Games to Teach Writing‘, which is full of useful ideas for teachers. One of these, which is new to us is ‘Gamics’. This is a contraction of games and comics, and would involve students using images from their favourite games to create their own comic.
Finally, Reinders has also been involved in making games for the ipod – he calls them podquests (a combination of ipod and webquest) and wrote a chapter of a book about this, which is available here: Podquests: Language Games on the Go
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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”.