Reflect…
November 19th, 2007My lesson plan dealt with using Zon (a massive multiplayer role playing ‘learning’ game) to help teach Chinese traditional Chinese greetings. Zon is currently in development at the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University and it was my dual intentions to test out the gaming platform as well as whether my lesson plans learning outcomes could be achieved. The lesson plan was simple by design with the attempt to not only introduce the environment to the students but also teach introductory content knowledge. The overarching lesson plan had included use of Zon’s social constructs, like audio and text chat, to help students progress through the exercise, but since I was not implementing the lesson plan on a large scale and using isolated subjects, the areas of the game pertaining to social constructivism and building an online community to help students work in their zone of proximal development could not be measured.
To implement my lesson plan I asked two undergraduate college students, one with technical experience and one without, to engage in play on one level in Zon and use the environment in an exploratory way to learn how to say “hello” and “goodbye” in Chinese. They only instruction given outside of the explanation of the learning goal was to help familiarize the student with the interface (how to click and select options, navigate, etc.) which was minimal at best. This was an attempt to see how readily students could transfer their knowledge from casual on-line games to Zon. I used Techsmith’s Camtasia screen recording software to record the students’ use of the environment as well as video of the students’ face while interacting with Zon. This provided a video that allowed me to analyze the students’ interaction with the interface and how long it took them to complete the learning tasks at hand. One recording was subsequently lost due to software failure, leaving only the latter, less technically proficient students recording intact to analyze. Since I did not observe the live session but was able to watch the first student’s video before it was lost to time, I decided to also conduct a dialog with the students to bolster my data.
After the students’ felt they had comfortably completed the learning task using Zon we engaged in a discussion of their findings. Both students were able to complete the task and provide the correct answers to my prompting, though the less technically experienced student confessed to prior knowledge with Chinese greetings during the post discussion. No long term assessment has been conducted though the students seemed comfortable in their knowledge, readily pronouncing the words “hello” and “goodbye” in Chinese without hesitation. Neither student felt it was difficult to discover the answers to the questions asked in the learning task, but one did express a lack of understanding of the interface stating, “I didn’t know what to do”. This I chalk up to my lack of explanation of the interface in an attempt to see how intuitive it was to non-gamers. Even with the students acclimating themselves to Zon’s interface, both students spent approximately five minutes interacting with the environment before the felt they had completed the learning goals.
Analyzing the video data I noticed that both students randomly clicked on objects in the immersive environment when starting out with the lesson. I feel this was an attempt to acclimate themselves with what is possible inside the game in an exploratory manner. This action was the first strategy the students developed using the game. Since the game is self paced, exploratory affair, it was important for the students to spend time learning this type of interaction. Once the students discovered that the menu system was dynamically generated based on what options were available for each object clicked, the quickly discovered what objects had learning content associated with them. From there the students were able to deduce what learning content would afford them the quickest solution to the learning task, quickly dismissing menu items that pulled up extraneous information.
As part of Zon, when interacting with an object in which a student will eventually engage in a form of dialog (a quasi assessment) there will be an attached movie clip with subtitles showing an authentic conversation in the context of the interaction. For instance, if a student is to attempt to buy food from a street vendor to increase their energy they will be able to watch and analyze the dialog between the vendor and a customer. The dialog tools allow the student to see each word and sentence in the dialog translated in Chinese characters, pinyin (Romanized pronunciation) and English with cultural information and the ability to hear the word or sentence repeated apart from the dialog. Students quickly identified this as the quickest way to complete the assigned learning task, studying one or both of the supplied example dialogs to discover two unique ways to say “hello” in Chinese and the most common form of saying “goodbye”. In this way, the game became more like a fancy treasure hunt. The students would quickly scan menu items of objects then engage in only the ones that had “observe” which was the example dialogs.
Even though games are often associated with behaviorism, especially games dealing with language, with their rote practice, Zon does not focus on rewards for completing tasks. You do not gain points for completing assignments, but further your ability to open new content. Through access to the game students are rewarded with more items of interest that allow the students to modify their avatar and generate uniqueness in the community. Even though the rewards are present, they are more long range and not the immediate feedback that is associated with behaviorism. The biggest affordance of Zon is the social interaction the students conduct in as a community of learners working through the levels. Like I state in my introduction, unfortunately this was not to be measured in this study since the participants were isolated.
The technology in this instance is not exactly a must have solution to the learning outcomes. It would have been far simpler to set the two students down and teach them through the rote standardized verbal way of teaching language. Aside from this, the technology allowed the students to become familiar with the environment which would allow them to revisit the technology and move in a self paced way, learning based on their own ability, language content that they would normally not have access to in the traditional way (without scheduling classes and tutoring sessions). I also believe that using an immersive environment helps the students understand social and contextual clues about how to use their new found knowledge in way that instruction would have taken longer to explain and been less authentic at doing. Only role playing in class or tutoring sessions could come close to the ability that the game has to take a student and immersive them in the actual environment where language proficiency becomes a motivating factor. By providing tools for the students to understand that environment and analyze social and lingual clues that student can quickly pickup and build upon their content knowledge in way impossible in a traditional class.
Zon is a good tool to add to a Chinese as a foreign language teachers toolbox. As a supplementary piece it excels in reinforcing in class instruction and students’ skill levels in way that is entertaining and educative. As a stand alone environment it can provide students an authentic way to discover and enjoy the Chinese language in a non-threatening environment which pushes the student just hard enough to keep them in their zone of proximal development without overwhelming them with extraneous information that would normally be doled out in a traditional classroom environment. Easily accessible and quickly utilized, I found from this study that Zon is headed in the right direction in its development and I’m excited to see the finished product being used by a wide range of Chinese language learners in the near future.