Unit 4 Reflection

To start unit 4, we discussed video game usage in the classroom. My experience with them is quite limited. The only game I have consistently enjoyed over a long period of time is Minecraft, and my interest in that only comes in intermittent spurts. I also had an Animal Crossing problem for about a month, but my addiction to it got so bad so fast that I would neglect myself and my needs in favor of catching digital fish. Needless to say, that had to stop. While video games are not exactly my thing, I have used them in an educational context. In my high school German class, we made videos for our end of unit projects, and I did the majority of mine in Minecraft. Our units were mostly about everyday topics, like parts of a house, colors, animals, hobbies, foods, and jobs. In Minecraft I was able to show these things through my character’s outfits, items in the game, and through sets I would build. In our reading, “Video Games in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom,” by Brady L. Nash and Randi Beth Brady, they discussed video games as a mode for learning and storytelling through “interactive, multimodal narratives” and this reminded me of my experience with them in my German class and I was inspired to go back into Minecraft and see what items in the game I could name off the top of my head after over a year of being out of practice. I surprised myself with how much I remembered. I made a list of what I could recall in a few minutes and attached photos for reference (shown in the image below). I chose to include this picture because it shows the power of video games as engaging learning tools. I nearly filled a whole page with my past vocabulary words, and that is only including the items in the game. In my brief walk down memory lane, I also remembered actions that I could do when I was playing, like walking (gehen) and running (laufen). Doing projects in Minecraft may seem silly, but what I learned has really stuck with me over the years. Through Minecraft I was able to assign context to my vocabulary words through the interactive gameplay and the result of that has been long lasting knowledge of conversational German that I could use, should I travel there.

Another experience I’ve had with video games is through my partner’s brother. He likes to play Red Dead Redemption and I occasionally look over his shoulder at what he is doing. In “Fostering Multimodal Analyses of Video Games,” the authors describe the GRAD framework. This is based on the Reader Response Theory and visually displays the cycle of input and output in video games. The players react to what they face in the game, and the game responds to the player’s actions by presenting new scenarios for the player to react to. In Red Dead Redemption, your character is pretty much always on the run from the law, or at least that is what I have gathered since the player I have watched seems to enjoy committing virtual crimes. Point being, if you do something against the law in the game, it immediately shifts so that the authorities are after you. The sounds become suspenseful, and the visuals intensify, offering the player the option to flee or stand and fight. This framework and in-game experience allows the player to choose their own adventure and explore the world that they have been placed in. I believe this to be a great tool to use in the classroom because it allows students to experience the world that they might be learning about in class. I can think of a number of times that I have wanted to live in the world that exists in a novel, and video games allow for that immersive experience. This could be used as a tool to build background knowledge of a time period or setting before reading a book placed in a world that students would be unfamiliar with. In the reading “’It Was like I Was There’: Inspiring Engagement through Virtual Reality,” students used VR headsets to experience the world from the perspectives of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. This is another example of the immersive qualities of VR and video games. A quote that stands out to me is from a student called Sarah. She says, “It gave a lot of information that helped me understand the novel more. I love it, and it is useful so that I understand what the characters are going through.” I love how she commented on VR allowing her to better put herself in the characters’ shoes, as what is reading if not exploring new perspectives to gain insight into the struggles the characters face? Video games and VR are not substitutes for reading, but enhancements of it, as they make the experience much richer.