\nAmong Us is an online game that is very similar to the drama game Mafia, or the board game Werewolf. It takes place on a space station, and there are Crewmates and an Imposter. The imposter goes around trying to kill the crewmates, who then try to figure out who the imposter is by discussing suspicious activities. The crewmates can win by completing spaceship tasks like cleaning various things, starting the engines, etc; or they can win by ejecting the imposter. The imposter can win by either killing or ejecting most of the crewmates, or by sabotaging the space ship enough that the crewmates can’t repair it within a certain timeline. You are not allowed to talk unless a dead body is reported, or an emergency meeting is called. When you are in a meeting, you must discuss the suspicious activities you’ve seen, and try to find the imposter, or, inversely, try to convince the crewmates that someone other than you is the imposter.<\/p>\n
Distance Learning Tech Note:<\/strong> How did we start playing this game in class? Setting Expectations:<\/strong> <\/p>\n The students came up with lots of excellent criteria. I was very impressed with their thoughts, and they took a lot of ownership in developing the expectations, which I think helped with their buy-in. We were working together to give them an opportunity they thought I had shot down for good.<\/p>\n Scaffolding Language Development:<\/strong> \n From there, we moved onto translating the tasks. We discussed which things we would translate literally, and the best ways to change some of the other tasks so that they made more sense in French. This led to a lot of great conversations on translation, and how, when you get comfortable with a language, you worry less about being literal, and more about preserving the sense of things. We created a cheat sheet and a set of survival phrases. But we were not yet quite ready to play.<\/p>\n For a few Fridays, we played different vocabulary games, made skits practicing using the language and vocabulary necessary, and finally, after weeks of buildup, we began to play.<\/p>\n So, how did it go?<\/strong> One Final Success, and Note on Targeted Grammar Instruction:<\/strong> I hope my little story has inspired you to try to find more authentic ways to help your students communicate and buy into what you’re teaching. This experience has given me some much-needed energy and drive after feeling like language teaching in a pandemic was just not going my way. Let me know if you have more ideas!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While online gaming doesn’t seem like something you see very often in an education environment, the most rewarding decision I have made this year so far has been to overcome my fear of trying to “manage” an online game and (at the request of my students) try to find a way to take one of … Continue reading “Gaming in the Classroom: using “Among Us” for authentic communication in Core French”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":63,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classroom-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nStudents can create private online games and play with just their classmates. Anyone who has the “join code” can join the game, even if they’re in another country or on another continent! I would put our remote learners on the conference speaker with the conference mic, so they could communicate with and negotiate the game with their classmates!<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>When the school year began, Among Us was a new game that was all the rage. Kids would play it at lunch time sitting socially distanced outside on the front lawn. Soon, one of my students began petitioning me: “Madame, can we try to play Among Us in French? It would totally make us talk.” I resisted. I didn’t know how to play, and I didn’t see the value. It was actually my partner, a francophone born and raised in Montreal, who convinced me over dinner one night that this might actually work. He is a fan of the game, and explained how it could actually be used to make them talk.<\/p>\n
\nI then began planning. I knew we would have to scaffold the development and set some serious expectations in place if I wanted my students to get any educational value out of the game, so I came to class one day and I told them that every Friday we would work towards playing Among Us in French. The very first thing we did was co-create expectations for rubrics for learning skills and oral speaking assessment criteria. My grade 10 class are no strangers to co-creation of criteria, so by the end of one class, we had the following two Jamboards, which eventually became rubrics (sorry they aren’t very clear – I can’t seem to fix that):<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/files\/2020\/10\/Screenshot-2020-11-18-160807.png\")
<\/a> ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/melissakurenoff\/files\/2020\/10\/Screenshot-2020-11-18-160730.png\")
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\nSince there is currently no French translation of the game, we had to take it upon ourselves to make our own (a huge shout-out to my partner here, who checked all of our more obscure sci-fi terminology to make sure it was accurate). We began with the map. It was a super fun process, and the students worked in sections to develop their part. Here is the final product:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nEven my reluctant speakers love this game and want to learn how to “finesse” each other as the imposter. They are incredibly invested in this, and this has led to great development in their speaking in a short time. They are doing what all the research suggests is perfect to create lasting learning – they are struggling (but not TOO much!) to communicate for a cause that means something for them. Every Friday they think they are getting a treat, when really, I am the one who is being treated – to real evidence and inspiration to continue looking for ways to create authentic opportunities for communication, with real buy-in. I will be very sad when they get bored of this. Fingers crossed it lasts the whole semester.<\/p>\n
\nThey realized fairly early that they would need to be using past tense and imparfait in order to express what they did and were doing in the game. We reviewed targeted use based on situations that happened in their short games. After each game, we have a language debrief. What vocabulary were they missing? What was hard to express? This targeted grammar with context, in a situation where they are fully engaged has been amazing. They really and truly understand the difference between how to use past tense and imparfait now, and I barely had to do any teaching.<\/p>\n