Educational Online Game (Word Frog)

The most challenging task for creating the rubric for the online educational game was the guidelines for the levels of achievement. It was quite difficult to create the wordings on how to gauge the performance of the educational game. We have different levels of achievement from exemplary to satisfactory and lastly needing improvement. Also, what was difficult was creating the outline of how the rubric was supposed to be graded on. We were not sure if we would grade the game on the basis of playability, its ability to engage students, etc. But after some collaboration, we were able to come up with criteria to base the game on. Rubrics are multidimensional sets of scoring guidelines that can be used to provide consistency in evaluating work (Edutopia, 2019). I believe that providing a rubric in any content area allows students to know what is expected of them and clearly states what is expected of them.

The Word Frog game can be used especially for English disciplines, especially at the fifth grade level. The fact that the game is able to switch interchangeably between synonyms and antonyms is also a challenge for students to pay attention to the topic. Having students pick out the correct word from the word bank and turning the frog to the target word also allows for some hand-eye coordination. Even for me, I find this game quite entertaining because I find myself having to scan through the words and accidentally select the wrong word from the word bank. It gets quite challenging when you are trying to get a high score in such a small amount of time as well.

My group and I, having selected this game for our assignment, think it is an effective tool for learning synonyms and antonyms. If it was the first time introducing synonyms or antonyms, it is definitely a good game to implement following the lesson. If we were to incorporate this game into some type of lesson plan, it would definitely be teams. Whichever team is able to rack up the most points in game will win a prize, such as extra credit, showing mastery of the topic. Some teachers may consider classroom games to be frivolities or distractions but they can form the integral core of a well staged lesson (Astbury 2017). But games are just games, they’re supplementary and they’re meant to make the lesson fun and interactive if it is taught properly.

The tools used for this project was a collaborative online document – google docs. Also in order to communicate, Whatsapp and Google Keep was utilized to keep an outline of our ideas for this project. With the technology that is available to us these days, it's amazing how collaboration can be done without physical human interaction.

References:

Astbury, M. (2017, August 25). Why classroom games can be much more than lesson fillers. Retrieved March 13, 2019, from https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/why-classroom-games-can-be-much-more-lesson-fillers

How Do Rubrics Help? (2008, July 15). Retrieved March 13, 2019, from https://www.edutopia.org/assessment-guide-rubrics