Third World Farmer

As I read in Wikipedia, serious games are simulations of real-world events or processes designed for the purpose of solving a problem.  Serious games are not a game genre but a category of games with different purposes. This category includes some educational games and advergames, political games, or evangelical games and they are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education.

Among the serious games, I played Third World Farmer for several times. This is a game that puts you in the shoes of a family of farmers in one of the poorest areas of the world. This remarkable simulation lets you make the important decisions that will determine if your family will prosper, or starve. Upon my experience, it is really not easy to play well. I had six turns but I only had 34 dollars left. Every decision you make should be very careful. You should think twice before action. If I would use this game for my future language teaching, my teaching objectives would be also teaching vocabularies. There are words like corn, cotton, wheat, chicken, cattle and so on. Since it is an out classroom game, I can add my students as family members in this game and I can keep interacting with them and see how they get along with the game. To assess the learning objectives, I would ask students how they make the money in this game. They would describe their selling and buying process by using target vocabularies. And I will also occasionally arrange a competition for them in class to assess their learning outcome of these vocabularies. Thus, through playing the game, they would acquire vocabularies in such a fun way!