Playing the Game of Spanish

"How is your teaching content area like a game?"

We were asked this question by our professor in class today. I think that is one of the things that helped me to fall in love with learning Spanish. In my first few years, learning Spanish was like this giant puzzle; I had to take all these pieces I was learning about and put them together to form grammatically correct sentences. It was a game in the sense that I had to build conversations and role play. After 4 years of studying Spanish I went on a school sponsored trip to Spain. Here we toured many different historical sites and stayed with a host family for a few of the days. It was after this trip that the though came across my mind that Spanish is more than a puzzle or game. By being in the country and using the language on a daily basis I realized its true existence as a way to communicate and express a culture. These experiences were more difficult to create in the classroom but became an extremely important part of my Spanish learning career.

The reason I bring up this experience is because of the answer I have to the posed question. Learning Spanish is like a game because of the same kind of "doing" that occurs in both. We talked in class about the way in which the skills used in gaming are similar to those used in learning (collaboration, problem solving, creativity, persistence, etc.). When thinking about it this way, the "Game of Spanish" works like this to me:

• The Players: the vocabulary and grammar structures
• The "Playing": putting it all together and building sentences
• Taking Risks: using the language, speaking, reading, and writing it
• Goal: making connections to culture and communicating

You need to use your players in order to do the playing. You do the playing by taking risks in order to reach your goal.

Like gaming, you enter a virtual world when you learn a language: you put yourself in roles, place yourself in the context of another culture, and role play in order to have a better understanding and further your knowledge. And you use the skills from gaming to help you in this world. Some examples of using these skills in this world include:

• Collaboration: working together with classmates to role play and practice
• Problem Solving: when faced with a verb conjugation, you must go through the different ones in your head and choose one based upon the context
• Creativity: coming up with round about ways to express what you might not yet be able to or what might not translate word for word from English
• Persistence: continuing to try to use the language, even if you make a mistake or feel embarrassment

My original thoughts about Spanish as this puzzle that comes to life, helped me to make connections to the idea of playing the "Game of Spanish" (any other given content area) that we discussed in class today. The act of "doing" (in my case, it was being immersed in a country that speaks the language) appears to me to be a great way of engaging students and getting them motivated to want to learn more about a subject.

Based upon what I've said so far, it can be conceptualized that learning Spanish is like a giant game. But "Could you set up a whole class like a game?" This was the question our instructor after our discussions today. I think it would be awesome to set up a class like a game! It would take a lot of planning, but it gets students really into what they are learning, why not? To set it up like a game, I think roles would have to be defined early in the first days of class (and added as new students come or others leave) and there would have to be clear objectives to overcome based upon each unit. Each unit could be broken up into smaller quests which help them to navigate through the game in order to get to the end (the final exam?). Each quest could have some sort of mystery or challenge attached to it that could be overcome. As I'm writing about this now, I'm realizing it sounds pretty similar to the way I described earlier about how the "Game of Spanish" worked. But overall I think that the idea of setting up a whole class like a game would be an amazing class to be in if done correctly and allowing for learning and experimenting along the way!