Adventures in Game Design

Every teacher worth their salt knows, roughly, 8,497 games and classroom activities off the top of their head. They have to. Not only is it sanity saving for them, games are valuable learning and teaching tools for every possible subject and lesson topic.

To be clear, games in this context means everything from board games (Monopoly and Uno) to classroom chalkboard games (Hangman and Bingo) and even to games the teacher makes up on the spot to solve a problem in the moment. It’s that last kind I’m going to focus on here.

I’ve been an English teacher in Japan for about 15 years now. What started off as a gap year between jobs turned into a career that has, at this point, ended up with me running my own English tutoring school. These things happen.

Since I teach a language as my subject, of necessity, I’ve created, adapted, or re-purposed all manner of games to help my students with grammar, vocabulary, idioms, pronunciation, spelling, and every other part of language learning.

Now, to detour for a second, I’ve long been fascinated by the rise in DIY publishing and Print-on-Demand technologies. Years and years ago, I experimented with publishing a book from my first blog (before the word blog was even coined, thank you very much) as well as a photo portfolio from lulu.com. They were fun projects to put together and I had a good time learning how it all worked.

A wild chase down the rabbit hole of the internet a while back lead me to DriveThruCards.com and I became intrigued by the idea of being able to print my own cards. Primarily, I was interested in the ease of creating and resulting print quality as an alternative to hand-cut and laminated flash cards.

I put together a deck of “conversation cards” — cards that students could use as speaking prompts when they were stuck for ideas or topics. This is not a new idea by any means. I had been using printed, cut, and laminated conversation cards for years, as had most the teachers I know.

However, when I replaced those cards with printed cards from DriveThruCards.com in class, there was a noticeable, positive response from my students. The homemade materials had not been bad or déclassé, but the professional looking materials seemed to confer an air of importance or prestige to their use in lessons. Further, when doing demonstrations for potential new customers, er, students, that same air of professionalism served to distinguish my school, at least somewhat, from competitors.

As a result of this convergence — teaching games and P.O.D. technology, I’ve been on a mission for the past six months to find ways to turn other home made teaching tools into professional (well, more professional) looking, printed products. It hasn’t been easy.

The Beginning

Brainstorming is the key action item on any good entrepreneur coder maker problem-solver teacher’s to-do list and as I’m no exception, that’s where I started. My first project, my conversation cards, had been pretty haphazard. I hadn’t really taken the time to think things through resulting in a lot of good, some bad, and some generally strange conversation prompts.

This time I started as basic as I could and failed into complexity. A simple list of basic, entry level, English grammar points quickly became several loosely cross-referenced lists of grammar, functions, expressions, colloquialisms, idioms, vocabulary, and assorted miscellania. From the resulting mess of notes, mind-maps, and did I mention the lists? I ended up with four ideas:

Alphabet cards, speaking prompts for kids, action prompts for kids, and a set of grammar cards. These ideas spread and grew, and eventually turned into four very different projects, each with its own challenges. What follows are brief descriptions of the projects and the biggest challenge I encountered with each.

Alphabet Cards

Helping kids learn their letters is a staple of my job. One of the problems I run into quite often is that, if I use letter tiles from a game like Scrabble or Bananagrams, younger kids get very confused over the use of all capital letters. Which makes sense — they’re told, over and over, that capitals are only for front letters of names and sentences.

I wanted my set of letter cards to be simple and to use both upper and lower cases. From there, my 52 card set of letters evolved into a matching game, with different colors for vowels and letter sounds and combinations like ch and ti and…I had to scale back. I decided that simpler was better and I decided on a simple 52 card memory matching game between upper and lower case letters.

The cards needed to be easy to read, which, in this case, meant clean color separations, bold lines, and that distinguishing a lowercase l from an uppercase I could be done at a glance, no matter the orientation of the card. At the same time, I did not want to use a handwriting font that would be very different from the English fonts my students would encounter in their school books.

As for the biggest challenge — did you know that fonts are licensed? I didn’t. I’ve been a computer user for most of my life and I know my way around a font or two. Or, at least, I thought I did. The rabbit hole I went down lead to several interesting articles, an excellent documentary (Helvetica), and several design and typography blogs.

In the end, I made a quick version of the cards using fonts found built into my Mac and hoping that no one decides to sue me over it. I plan to re-do the project with a custom, licensed font one of these days, so that I can a) be sure to have proper upper and lower case letters that the kids can recognise easily and b) be fully aboveboard and legal should I attempt to mass produce it.

Speaking and Action Prompts for Kids

The next ideas I decided to play with were action and speaking prompts for kids lessons. My thinking went like this: kids like familiar games. Teachers like to keep the lesson moving quickly to keep kids interested (especially in voluntary education like my job entails). One of the better tricks for maintaining fun and balance is to use very quick songs or actions between activities.

Therefore, how about a deck of cards the student could draw from that would prompt her or him to either say something or to do something. I started by playing around with the actual prompt: Say Something vs. Let’s Speak, Do Something vs. Let’s Play, for example. As of this writing, I’ve decided on Let’s Talk and Let’s Play for speaking prompts and action prompts respectively, but I’m not married to either idea.

Choosing the actual prompts proved to be much easier than deciding what to call them, after all, using these kinds of prompts in lessons has been part of my teaching strategy for the better part of my working life.

For speaking, I decided simple things that kids know how to do but that avoided yes or no answers would be best. Eventually I had a list of twenty prompts based around the 5W questions that included things like:

“What’s your favourite color?”

“When do you like to eat ice cream?”

“Who is your best friend?”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Why do you like cats?”

These gave shy kids or those with less ability the chance to answer with one word, but also allowed more advanced students to use full, complex sentences.

Actions have been a little more difficult as my classroom is very small and I don’t want kids tearing the place up more than they already do. Also, I had to limit the verbs to common school vocabulary — there couldn’t be any “anchor yourself to the wall” style questions. I decided on a set of prompts centered around common games like Simon Says and songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. By adding numbers and colors, I was able to get a list like:

“Touch something red.”

“Stand up and sit down three times.”

“Clap ten times fast.”

“Walk around the table like a penguin.”

“Find something big.”

So far, so good. Then I thought, wouldn’t those cards be so cute with, for example, a penguin on the card that says walk like a penguin? The trouble is, I can’t draw. It might be more honest to say, I don’t know how to use photoshop and other design / illustration software well enough to get my drawings on the cards and looking really nice to boot. Perhaps it would be even more honest to add, and I don’t feel like learning right now. (Someday, sure, but right now? I’m busy, dammit! I’ve got all these cards to make!)

I looked at hiring an illustrator. There are a lot of fantastic illustrators out there. Reddit and Deviant Art and Tumblr have hundreds of artists just a search away. Only, I’m broke. And this is just a pet project to make my life easier. But if I had professional art, maybe I could sell these decks to other teachers? But see point one about having no money. And on and on.

I looked into royalty free and stock options and while there are a number of good options out there, I ended up right back at hiring an illustrator. Which I haven’t done yet. I plan to, someday, but before hiring an illustrator, I need to make sure I’ve done all the work on my end — color palette, appropriate style, number of illustrations, what I want those illustrations to be, and, most important, that I have the money set aside to pay for quality service.

At the moment, I’ve put together both decks sans illustrations and not for sale, just to make sure that the prompts are exactly what I want them to be. Think of this phase as product testing. I plan to give myself several months of using the text only prompts (printed from DriveThruCards) while keeping careful notes of revision points and then, and only then, will I start looking for illustrators.

Grammar Cards

By far the most nebulous item on my list was a set of grammar cards. One of the challenges of my job is working with adults from all walks of life and having to both be prepared for and to cater to all different manner of students. It’s not unusual for me to have, in a given day, two middle aged engineers, a retiree, and a brace of young mothers who are studying while their children are at school. How then, to make a set of grammar based cards that would serve all their individual needs as students without becoming overly complicated?

What soon became clear was that, while the original iteration, the conversation cards, had been (and still are) very useful for end of class or in depth discussions, they did not work well at the beginning of lessons. It seemed to be a case of too much, too soon for many students as they had not yet made the mental switch to English.

I decided to work with the question “Have you ever…?” Not only does it have a direct, easily translated counterpoint in Japanese, but it is also answerable with only yes or no, meaning that lower level students could concentrate on listening and comprehension rather than producing a long string of complex sentences.

As I played with example sentences to include in the deck, I realised that I could assign points to the commonality of the experience contained in the question. For example, in the question “Have you ever eaten foreign food?” the experience of eating foreign food is both nebulous enough and common enough that even school children can answer yes most of the time. (A little fudging might be required, but neither spaghetti nor curry is native to Japan!)

Following on this thought, rarer experiences, e.g. “Have you ever eaten tapas?” and very rare experiences like “Have you ever eaten deep fried spiders?” (Served in parts of Southeast Asia and not at all popular with the tourists.) could be worth more points. And, of course, once you have points involved, you have a game.

Soon I had three categories of questions — food, travel, sports, with 15 one point questions, 10 two point questions, and 5 three point questions in each category. To up the difficulty, I added bonus questions that consisted simply of Who, Where, When (one point each), Why and Who (two points each), and How (three points).

I whipped up a quick design and printed the cards on paper. I’ve played with several students and a few fellow teachers and now I have lots and lots of changes to make. Oh so many changes. Mainly in the point values in the bonus questions and in the number of points that determines the winner (I had thought two players playing to 21 would be a quick game. It is, if both are fluent English speakers.)

But once again, the biggest challenge to my DiY projects was my lack of skills. In addition to not being an illustrator, I’m not a designer (neither type nor layout apparently). But I can hire people, or I can learn. And I’m doing so. In the meantime, I’m play testing my game and use testing my kids prompts and, with any luck, in a few months I’ll be ready to take all my notes and have a go at revising these products, with all new mistakes to and frustrations to encounter along the way.