Educational Games: fun and meaningful all at once!

Do you have any idea what educational games are? Have you ever tried to play any educational games before? Educational games are the games that are enjoyable to play but at the same time, it is purposeful. While playing the game, we will reach certain objectives that are meaningful to gain and are useful in our daily lives. Our lecturer, Ms. Yoon Sook Jhee has encouraged us to play these kind of games and find some ways that we can integrate these games in our lessons, specifically in writing.

Haiti Catastrophe (introduced by Ms. Yoon)
This game lets its' players to choose which role they would like to play as. Next, the players will determine the best choice that they can work on in order to help the victims. The choices must be relevant and brilliant. There is no right or wrong choice but of course there is better choice or the worse ones. So basically it'll educate the players to choose wisely and sort of imagine how it is like, to be in that role's shoes. Overall it's a great game.

*click on pictures to enlarge*

So these are some of the snapshots of the game, it basically educate its players in playing a role wisely. 

Some of the writing activities that we can come up with:

1. Ask students to write on their experience about the roles that they played.

2. Ask students to choose the roles and write a passage on the responsibilities carried as the role chosen.

3. Teacher creates more roles, and ask them to write what would that role do in order to accomplish a certain task. 

There are some other sites all over the Internet that are intended for educational purposes. Nobel prize, for instance also provided some educational games for everyone, including some other subjects offered in schools. 

URL: http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/all_productions.html

Although most of the subjects that Nobel stresses on are Sciences subjects, English teachers may do a little bit of an adjustment to teach writing.