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2014 CALL Conference
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be
result, some students could not activate the chat-room needed to participate in the
collaborative murder-game.
In contrast all students were able to enroll in the first part of the game and thus to test
levels 1 to 3.
More than half of the participating learners were able to fulfill the 9
mini-games
successfully in only one game-session, which lasted around 90 minutes. The remaining
students played at least 8 of the mini-games successfully.
Only one of the participating students could not pass level 3 since it took him the entire
game session of 90 minutes to complete level 1 and 2. However, in general students got
very quickly through part 1 and 2
of each game level, as these were based on simple
tasks such as matching photos with their corresponding audio-files or texts. In contrast
learners took much longer to complete part 3 of each game-level since this requires them
to focus on their writing. Nonetheless, as foreign language students usually have more
difficulties with speaking and writing than with reading and listening,
they considered
part 3 not only the most challenging, but also the most useful part of the mini-games, as
they felt obliged to focus more on their writing.
Survey
Once students had finished participating in the game we asked them to report their
game-experience by describing their feelings and difficulties they had when using the
App. Students’ feedback was
vital for improving the App-design and making it more user-
friendly and efficient. Amongst the feedback and suggestions
we received from the
players these were the most common:
Some students reported problems related to their personal keypad which did not allow
them to use German vowel mutation such as “ä”, ö” and “ü” and thus to fulfill some of
the written game-tasks successfully. This can be easily solved by installing one of the
many freely available multi-language extensions for the Android smartphone keyboard.
From this we can conclude that students have never
used their smartphones to
communicate in German, this game being their first time. Other students reported
problems when using the wireless connection at their university or school. Problems were
reported especially by school students since access to the internet is usually restricted at
schools in order to prevent students from accessing social-networks (Facebook, twitter)
or chat-rooms (whatsApp) during school time.
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