Shiv on Learning

Virtual Paintball has been in our library of classes for two years now and is an extremely valuable learning tool for the students involved.

Here are some buzzwords and phrases commonly used by the great and good of our industry:

interactivity, co-construction of knowledge, learner engagement, learner’s voice, relevance, teachers enabling students, socially mediated, communicative, inter-cultural, needs-driven, community-based, learner-directed, maximized learning opportunities, peer learning….

(the list could go on)

Our paintball class shows an example of how many of these principles can be applied in a virtual world.

A game of Paintball can take many forms; we use variations of capture the flag.

• Step 1- Divide all your players into two equal teams.
• Step 2- Set up two home bases. Place a flag in the center of each home base.
• Step 3- Determine a length for the game. Length should depend on the learning outcomes and the amount of players. Bigger areas and more players need more time, but you shouldn’t allow too much time. Short games put the pressure on for action and are generally more exciting. Make sure everyone knows how the game is to be started and stopped.
• Step 4- Position yourselves at your home bases. (see location of bases)
• Step 5- Begin the game.Each team must devise its own strategy to try to reach the other team’s flag and return it to home base without the team’s own flag being taken.
• Step 6- Hit other players with your paintballs to make them “out.” These players will be frozen for 10 seconds before they can resume.
• Step 7- Capture the opposing team’s flag and hang it in your own base before time runs out.
• Step 8- Switch home bases each game.

Friday’s game took place in a hotel in English City. This allowed players to learn the language required to describe all areas of the hotel. The two bases were positioned so teams would have to navigate through most of the hotel to reach their opponents flag. They would need to be able to, describe, understand and follow routes through the buildings.

Sample dialogue students were using during the game:

“The flag is in the red room on the first floor, it’s on the left”

“They’re hiding behind the reception desk”

“Stay on the second landing and make sure nobody comes out of the bedrooms on the left”

“Go down one flight of stairs, through the lobby into the dining room. Go on to the balcony of the dining room, jump off the west side, use the swimming pool for cover and fire on everyone in the gym”

As you can see, the students describe the environment while playing the game and giving detailed instructions. In a warm up game- played outside- students were talking about trees, concrete, walls, plants and grass. It is a very effective way to get them to learn and use the vocabulary of a location.

This is where the communication takes place. Students have the task of capturing the opposing team’s flag while defending their own. The teams need to devise a strategy, convince their team mates of it, ensure everyone understands the plan and also that they are able to execute it while under enemy fire. They are in a private voice channel with their team mates during the game, so they are in constant contact. Of course, players get shot, plans don’t work, teams have to react to the opposition’s strategy. This all means a lot of the strategy has to happen in real time. Students need to constantly articulate their current status, location and the location and status of the enemy to the rest of their team to be successful.

The game is designed so that team work is required for a team to succeed, no single player could do it independently. Last week’s game involved 12 players and 2 instructors (1 per team). If the team doesn’t work well together it will fail, regardless of how good any individual player is. Working together requires frequent and effective communication.

Teams are usually organized so that none of the players have a common language other than English.

Computer games are more engaging for students than classrooms. Active experiences, undertaken by the student’s own volition, are more engaging than top-down, passive experiences (i.e. ‘the sage on the stage’). The students are less distracted, enjoy the experience more, and as a result learn more. To an uninformed onlooker, a child completely engrossed in a video game can appear unhealthy. As a matter of fact it can be an ideal mental state for learning.

Students are excited with attacking, nervous when they sense danger, surprised when something unexpected happens, puzzled when they are lost, jubilant whey win, disappointed when they lose. A competitive game of Paintball is a roller coaster of emotionand we all know the effect of emotion on memory (i.e. positive).

The grammar structures, vocabulary and functional language mentioned above were all used in the paintball game. The students did not have time to think about what language to use when they were playing - if they did this they would have hesitated and been knocked out. The urgency and pace of the game required them to use the language naturally, and the ability to send IMs (instant messages) to each other and the team leaders (both instructors) allowed the game to progress quickly and give the students an authentic risk-free FPS experience.

At Languagelab paintball sessions typically last 2 hours. 1.5 hours of this is spent playing the game. Each round lasts 10 – 20 minutes. The 2 hour time limit is an artificial one, imposed to give our instructors a breather. Any gamer (or parent of gamer) will know that a game like this can be comfortably played for hours at a time.

No.

In a computer game players get defeated, lose, and are unsuccessful most of the time. Yet they are not discouraged, do not lose their motivation and keep going until they are successful. For more on this see learner gaming and motivation.

Grammar:

Imperatives - Go, Run, Hide, Jump, Shoot, Help, Stay, Crouch …

Directions - Left, right, up, down, north, south, east, west ….

Prepositions - Above, below, behind, next to …

Verb tenses:

Present continuous - I am running, She is walking. He is shooting.

Past simple - He ran over there. She followed him.

Past continuous - She was following him and got shot. I was shooting him until I fell.

Future with will - I’ll shoot him now! She’ll shoot me if I walk out there!

Future with going to - Planning/strategy - Ok, you’re going to take the left side and you’re going to cover Ling, ok?

Vocabulary:

to invade

to retreat

to defend

to defeat

to occupy

to surrender

a treaty

an ambush

a target

a gun

to shoot

energy

team

to cover

to attack

to flank

to surround

to rout

to hold

to bolster

to melee (gaming)

to pwn (gaming)

Vocabulary of the Arena (in this case hotel)

reception

lobby

main entrance

room

bathroom

stairs

ball room

dining room

pond

swimming pool

garden

You would need a completely different set of tasks to teach this language without a virtual world. You couldn’t play Paintball in a real hotel or office space. Even Paintball in a field or other arena would not be the same as the teams would not be able to communicate as effectively. Private voice channels in virtual worlds mean team members are in constant contact. This can’t be done in the real world because the opposing team will hear you, you will be exhausted from running around and your team members may be too far away.

A classroom would require a variety of different scenarios: you could, for example, play a miming game for the prepositions or refer to pictures, primarily as many adult students don’t really enjoy TPR, and the thought of jumping onto a chair or hiding under a table would fill them with horror!

For the verb tenses a combination of presentations, games and activities using the tenses and role-play can be used. Timelines are a good tool, but the paintball game is a great way to use the tenses in a context that the students all understand and that is common to them at that moment in time as they have all experienced it.

The war and battle vocabulary could be taught using historical examples or with a strategy game, like Dungeons and Dragons, but you would not get the immediacy of the paintball game. Moreover, teaching vocabulary like this could be rather dry.

As Prensky said at IATEFL 2009,”Before you can take advantage of the technology, you have to change the pedagogy”. Fortunately for us virtual worlds are very well suited for community based learning, co-construction of language, instructor mediated learning, etc. In fact if you analyze the behaviour and learning that has always taken place in multiplayer 3D computer games, you will find that they have always leveraged these techniques - consciously or otherwise.

Paintball is a very effective way for students to learn the language above. Far from the old transmission models of language teaching, it allows students to co-construct language while partaking in an engaging activity. As you can see, what is often considered a frivolousness game is an opportunity for rich, natural language practice of a kind that cannot easily be reproduced in another medium.