Gamification in education is used as a solution to students’ apathy and disinterest in the learning process. Gamification can motivate students to participate in the classroom, provide teachers with better tools to instruct and reward students, encourage and develop lifelong learning habits, and make education a fun experience. In the language classroom, especially in the online language classroom, task-based language teaching can be a great solution to the problem of underground motivation and lack of student engagement in learning the subject. Gamification, which fulfills the characteristics of the task-based approach, provides learners with a greater level of engagement and immerses them in a virtual and realistic environment, thus making language learning more efficient and effective.

Game competition time
Spinning wheel 1
Spinning wheel 2

Spinning wheel 1:
Click on the ‘play/stop’ button to start spinning the wheel, and click it again to stop the wheel. Each player will take turns clicking the mouse and reading the word pointed by the pointer and saying what it means in English. The player who answers correctly will get 1 point.

Learning Goal:
Recognize&Memorize Chinese Characters

Guess Who I Am

Guess Who I Am:
Players take turns choosing to click on the squares and answer in a rush, whoever is the fastest to answer the correct answer, gets 1 point.

Learning Goal:
Recognize Chinese Characters and understand the meaning of the new vocabulary.

Shoot the Spaceships

Shoot the Spaceships:
Click the start button to play the game. Players correctly read the text on the spaceship in action to shoot it down. All players play the game at the same time, and whoever has the most accurate and fastest answer will shoot down the spaceship and get 1 point.

Learning Goal:
This game tests the students’ Chinese character recognition and reaction skills.

Scoreboard

Mandarin Class Game

Please download this file in .pptm format for the presentation. The Notes in the PPT document record how to play each game and the learning outcomes, as well as links to the instructional videos used to create the games.

Academic Materials:

  1. The Power of Gamification in Education
  2. What is Gamification?
  3. The Value of Gamification for Language Learning
  4. Jueru, T., e Silva, R. F., & Ferrao, S. (2019). Success factors for using gamification in language teaching. 2019 International Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/SIIE48397.2019.8970125

Game Production Tutorial Video:

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI4W37tErKU – Spinning Wheel
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtyNIO119kg – Guess Who I Am
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc03nL2D5BI – Shoot the Spaceships
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WbJCGoSzhU&t=462s – Scoreboard
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE9u5XO_o0w&t=100s – Spinning Wheel Web