Kitchen Escape

As I read in 7 Things You Should Know about Gamification, gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior. In academe, gamification typically employs elements like points, badges to engage or motivate students in learning process.

For me, in language teaching, gamification offers an opportunity for students to interact with each other while engaging their imaginations and motivations at the same time. Teachers can enliven their instruction with contests or rewards that encourage students a positive attitude toward language learning.  The game took advantage of human desire to compete and socialize as well as to measure progress toward clear goals. Therefore, through gamification, students can generate unexpected solutions to the course objects.

Among the Escape the Room Games, I found Kitchen Escape very interesting. At first, I totally get lost in this game because I don’t know what I am supposed to do. After I watched the walk through video for the game, I got a clear goal and was familiar with the rules. Then I played the game for three times, it was really fun!

For language teaching, I think this game can be used to facilitate teaching vocabularies and description of objects. So by using this game, students’ learning objectives would be learning vocabularies. In this game, students need to find several objects in order to escape the kitchen. During this process, they will learn words like kettle, battery, leather and so on.  When I learned English, vocabulary memorizing is always a boring process, but through this game, students can remember words easily with vivid visual impact and a lot of fun. What’s more, instead of solely memorize the word, students can get a better understanding of how to use the word, like use kettle to boil water; use boiled water to cook frozen fish, etc. By competing with each other that who escape faster, students can be involved while learning.

As a teacher, the role in this activity is like the walk through, that give students hints and instructions when they have difficulties and guide them towards learning. Game is just to assist learning process, teachers don’t want it to bring negative influences to students. For me, I would definitely use the walk through for the game, because I don’t want my students to be discouraged. And I will consistently give them prompts. After they all played the game, I will arrange a speed answering game to assess whether they acquire the vocabularies by holding pictures and to see who is the first to answer correctly. I will using the images in the game for my assessing part. For example, I will hold the picture of kettle, and student who answer kettle first will be awarded a badge for his/her performance. I could not wait using this kind of game in my class!