Games2Teach is a simple website designed by two American language instructors to help learners and teachers leverage games for language learning. The site is split into 4 sections: Home, Learn, Download, and Explore. From the Home section, the designers let us know that: “[They] believe that games can challenge and motivate learners to use language in meaningful, productive ways. Studies have shown that game-based approaches to learning develop social skills, improve deep knowledge, and provide better outcomes for learners.” But how good of a job does the website do at promoting those learning outcomes? Let’s take a look!
Learn
The “Learn” page is a fairly rudimentary blog section, not too dissimilar from the one we run here. It mostly covers items they have added to the other section, so onwards we go!
Download
This one has four sub-sections, but the only one of particular relevance to us is the “Classroom Activities” section. In it, we have 13 worksheets, each covering different games. Not all mention which languages they practice, but I have found the sheets to be created with care, and they seem like a good addition to a classroom environment or to use with a tutor (or independently by a diligent/advanced learner). They are long, cover a range of topics, and build on fundamental language skills through one’s experience in the game. Although there are few games covered (and some of them are quite niche), the worksheets themselves appear exhaustive and ideal to use as exercises with a tutor.
When you download something from the website, it will prompt you to enter an email and your name. It hasn’t sent me an email thus far, so I’m not sure this functionality is still online. You will need an actual email address to enter though, as the input field still requires a valid input. Additionally, it will encourage you to pick however many worksheets you like, claiming it will open 1 window per download. This isn’t the case – it will require you actually download each one individually, lest you only want the first of your checked items.
Explore
This is the section that seemed the most promising to me when I first opened it. At first glance, it is a repository of various links to journals, games, and game designers. However, I found that many links were either broken or sent me to places I did not expect to go (most likely because the website appears to last have been updated in July 2018). The “Search Games” functionality seemed particularly useful for searching games for our library, which was my first instinct, but I was quickly met with a non-user friendly table with far too much information that doesn’t pertain to our goals to be useful for my purposes. However, they do present us with a framework and categories which we can use here to help us define categories for our library, which is particularly helpful as we work on building something functional and user-friendly to supplement language learning.
Conclusion
Moving forward, I don’t think I’ll be basing much of my work on this website. However, the Classroom Activities subsection of the Download portion of the site is the main attraction of this website. The rest of the website isn’t exactly designed for language learners specifically, and I’m not sure I’d necessarily recommend the site for instructors either, as the amount of material is a little low and quite specific, but the design of an actionable framework in the Explore section and the detailed worksheets are definitely worth a look, even if I don’t necessarily think I would have chosen the same method of presentation.