Almost always, the learning process is not associated with the achievement of knowledge, happiness from understanding something new and improving one’s skills. And with the daily routine, uninteresting activities and difficult tasks. Schoolchildren and students, and especially the first ones, are very reluctant to study, especially at the beginning.
But it is possible to diversify this process to make it interesting? For example, using video games.
It’s probably no secret that the field of computer interactive entertainment has reached a fairly high position. Just 20 years ago, video games were something wild and aimed only at children. And already in 2011, video games were officially recognized as an art form by the US government and the US National Endowment for the Arts. But for now it remains entertainment, or video games can even help in learning foreign languages and in school? Let’s find out about it.
As you know, all people in childhood learn through play. And some developers immediately realized that such a teaching technique would not only be easier for children to assimilate, but would also be much more interesting.
The first educational computer group was The Oregon Trail – an educational computer game about the life of American pioneers, widely used in schools in North America. The name of the game is related to the real Oregon Trail that existed in the 19th century. The player controls a group of migrants with a specific profession and traveling to Conestoga.
The first version of the game was developed in 1971 for teletype machines that ran on the TIES system. Code written by Bill Heinemann. One of the developers, Don Ravitch, was a school teacher and, since 1974, an employee of the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC). Oregon Trail was distributed by a consortium to educational institutions, and the code was published in Creative Magazine. In the mid-1980s, the program gained popularity on Apple school computers. Later versions were distributed by Brøderbund after MECC was sold to The Learning Company. There was an unlicensed Russified version of this game for computers of the Elektronika-60 and UIK families, capable of running RAFOS and RT-11SJ OS, as well as desktop computers (for example, the SM-4 series) running RV OS.
After that, quite a lot of new crafts appeared. This game clearly began to show that video games have become widely used in teaching students. After its success, mass production of various video games for education began. In particular, there were even several for learning foreign languages, of which I would like to highlight the following:.
Nessy Learning Program – is an interactive, multimedia computer program used in primary schools in the UK to help students with dyslexia (inability to master text reading skills).) From 5 to 16 years old, read and write with self-confidence. The program is developed and updated by Net Educational Systems.
My Chinese Coach is a video https://safari-bingo-casino.co.uk/bonus/ game for Nintendo DS and iOS developed by Sensory Sweep Studios and published by Ubisoft. As part of the My Coach series, the game teaches Chinese through a series of lessons and games. It was released in 2008.
FutureU is an educational video game developed and published by Aspyr Media on November 5, 2008 for Windows, Mac OS X and Nintendo DS and created in collaboration with test preparation company Kaplan, Inc. It is conventionally divided into several sections. The Reading section has a Character mode, which gives the player a word that has a prefix and suffix. Next to the word there are several images that can be used to construct the word. In another reading mode, the player is shown predictions, sentences with two missing words that must fill in the blanks. The Recording section contains the “Ante Up” and “Wrong Writing” modes. In Ante Up Score, the player is given one part of a sentence and three possible phrases that can complete it. The Wrong Letter mode gives a sentence and asks the player to determine if he has any errors. If there are any, the player must determine where they are. After this, the player must choose a phrase that corrects the sentence.
Scribblenauts Unlimited — The game was announced during the 2012 Nintendo E3 press conference. It allows you to create any item in the game world by simply writing its name in a magic notepad. Next, imagination comes into play, locations begin to live their own lives, and simple puzzles are solved in the most unexpected ways. A malicious werewolf can be assigned the word “dead” in order to kill him, and a sad executioner can be assigned “dancing” so that he starts dancing. Ride a chatty cockroach, giving it a “giant” size, and glue a motor on top for fast movement. Or a siren to make noise. In the game, all we do is turn on our imagination. The whole point of this game is that during all this you need to write real words, and also follow the rules of languages. Which allows you to learn new words and learn to read and compose complex phrases.
And not only with the help of stationary games, which, as many believe, are most in demand for children, it is possible to learn languages.There are also many sites through which you can improve your knowledge. They will help you both learn a new language and improve your knowledge of old languages. I would like to cite sites that I myself use very often.
— a free platform for language learning and crowdsourcing text translation. The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help translate websites, articles and other documents. As of May 2016, Duolingo offered courses:
– Latin American English, Ukrainian, French, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Italian and others – for English-speaking users,
– American English for those who know Ukrainian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Greek and Arabic,
— French for those who know Spanish and German,
— English, Spanish, French, German for those who know Russian,
– Portuguese for Spanish speakers and
— Spanish for Portuguese-speaking users.
In addition to the website, there are applications for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 10.
The effectiveness of Duolingo’s approach, based on statistical analysis, was verified by third-party research commissioned by the company. A study conducted by professors at the City University of New York and the University of South Carolina found that 34 hours of Duolingo yields the same reading and writing skills as an initial semester course at an American higher education institution, which takes about 130 hours. The study did not assess speaking skills. In a study, 108 out of 196 people learning a language on Duolingo quit after less than 2:00. The same study found that Rosetta Stone users needed 55 to 60 hours of study to learn the same amount of knowledge. No comparison has been made with other free or low cost courses such as BBC and Before You Know It. It is also possible to obtain a diploma in studying a particular language, which will even be accepted at some workplaces.
site still under development. Suitable only for people who already know the language and are trying to improve their skills. This site helps you quickly improve your vocabulary in different languages. In particular from Turkish, English, German, Chinese, Italian, Polish and others. There are about 21 languages in total. The study takes place in the format of choosing the correct word for one of 4 pictures.
This allows you to quickly learn the spellings and phonetically correct pronunciation of words, since each answer is pronounced.
In addition to everything that is written above, I advise you to play games with the original voice acting and text. Willingly or unwittingly, you will begin to understand the essence of the game and some words. I improve my language skills well by playing World of Warcraft. Simply by joining a foreign guild and constantly communicating with them, you can raise your skills to incredible heights.
As we see, learning does not have to always be boring and uninteresting. It is possible to diversify the learning process for both schoolchildren, students and adults. I believe that this method is the future.