Im working on a game for an Elementary School English class in Japan, where each student will have a handful of monsters (maybe 2 or 3) with different strengths and weaknesses. The English learning will be loosely tied into the attacking, but really irrelevant to the game mechanics. Elementary school English is simply not at the level where I can tie the English even remotely into the physics of the game.
Students will challenge each other to incredibly quick skirmishes, 1 minute or less, before moving on to the next challenger. I've tried a number of combat mechanics, but am unable to find the balance between simple enough for me to explain, complex enough to be fun. Would appreciate any thoughts or ideas!
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Im teaching in a elementary school in Japan that everyone has given up hope on. Most teachers have found apathy is the best defense for dealing with disrespectful kids with disrespectful parents.
Im just their English teacher once a week, but I can see that the kids are smart and bored. They are bored because English education in Japan is incredibly wishy washy, with no firm curriculum, tests, quizes or homework. So there's no real motivation for paying attention in class. Since my mandate is focused more on kindling interest, and less on covering standardized material, I do have a lot of freedom in the class. I want to start using games as a way to make English class fun, and as an ongoing rewards system, good students will get bonuses for their characters and a better chance of winning battles.
Guys, Thanks so much for your time and thoughts! What a great response. I like this place.
Traz is right, RPS is unbelievably popular here and has huge potential as a mechanics foundation or component. I’ve employed it for some simple go fish style games. I would love to build a combat game around it, if I could add the right amount of complexity to make it more interesting but not confusing.
My first attempt at a game was a little like Larienna mentioned, a monster with hp and 3 attacks, each relative to RPS. If your RPS attack was successful you subtracted the according points from the enemy’s hp. I planned on just upgrading the characters as time went on. It’s a good, manageable step from a game they already know. But my version still lacked a little something, like it was just more RPS, but with some subtraction involved. 5 way RPS is definitely something I want to look into. Maybe a even a card game system with a color wheel yellow beats green, green beats blue. Could be fairly easy across language barriers.
I like the idea of having 2 cards for each RPS attack like Fhizban said, that’s an interesting twist. Could be that on vocab cards theres also a R P or S which could be used for attacking. Fun and simple twist. Could be easy to make semi disposable cards (I already do) with little R, P, or Ss on them somewhere. Thanks for your cents. Nice idea.
My ideas often get drawn into personal card decks for students. There’s tons of freedom for cumulative complexity in the game, cards can get more and more creative once the students get the hang of the combat. Difficult English words would get increasingly more powerful. However that may be a catch 22, I don’t want to make some cards obsolete and if I want to keep battles short and sweet, that means small hands of cards 5 or less probably. So the students will only practice the english for the 5 best cards. Maybe if the 5 card hand somehow supplemented the student’s personal character, and I dished out the cards at the beginning of the class according to what were learning; I could control what language theyll practice, but of course I still want to give them strategic freedom.
Congentesque,
Agreed, it’s gotta be fun without English. I gotta be able to reach the kids who are at the bottom of the barrel, and theyre gonna shut down if the smarties are always winning. The best way may be just English on almost a subliminal level, like rote memorization involved in some attacks. I hate saying that as a teacher, but the infrastructure is just not in place for more intense education (45 minutes a week per student). I love the idea of naming monsters or attacks after vocab, could go down the card deck route and make each flash card a monster with varying specs or perks relative to a 6 sided die (D6 right?). The challenge with that will be to keep students interested by making sweeter cards, without making the beginning cards obsolete. Or maybe that’s okay, I don’t need to drill them with fruits and vegetables all year. Not to mention of course, physically making hundreds of cards.
Orangebeard,
it’s a totally sweet idea to make the mechanic tied directly into learning English, but the level is definitely not there. Right now I’m just teaching Basic English for sure. Your idea would be awesome for my 8th graders in middle school, but my partner teacher there is not really game-friendly. I’m slowly working on him… introducing Jeopardy next week which apparently is earth-shattering.
InvisibleJon,
That’s a sweet idea with the bag of beads, totally perfect in complexity. I’d love to also have some kind of tangible aspect to the mechanic as well. Very good for explaining. I suppose I could hold on to all the students’ bags, though it would prevent any outside of class gaming, but maybe that would help increase the hype when it was time to play. Definitely will be thinking more on this in the next few days. Agreed on the public recognition, that’s huge for motivation for the kids (and everyone). Also If I get a workable game I may also build asimple story around the battles and have bosses prepared for the students to fight, but that’s the cart before the horse!
Larienna and Defunkt
Really nice ideas and critiques, the RPS mechanic is completely ingrained and ready to be morphed into something else. I agree with Defunkt that the attacks and monsters should be relevant English, particularly what they will begin learning in the middle school curriculum. not opposed to making the game more abstract with only point values for attack and defense.