Teacher, trainer and award-winning writer Kyle Mawer answers The Image Conference Questionnaire.
Your favourite film:
Fave film is Pulp Fiction. It’s one of those films I can watch again and again. One day I plan to use the Easter egg and watch it in chronological order. Astro Empires and Clash of Clans are two gamesites I return to again and again. You build and expand empires and chat to your fellow cohorts.
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Your favourite film to use in class:
Groundhog Day is my favourite film to use in class. I like Bill Murray and the comedic element in the repetitive scenes works really well. An online game called Droppy is a game I can generate most interesting language from. I’ve used it for past tenses, separable phrasal verbs and defining relative clauses on different occasions with different classes.
Useful game-related teaching website:
My own wikispace called ‘Kyle Mawer’, which has a lot of links to games, video and written walkthroughs. By the way, a walkthrough is a way of communication what to do in a game to complete it.
Tell us a bit about your session:
I’m going to look at images of games I’ve used in class, how I’ve used them and in an order that starts from early gaming history through to more modern ones (with a bit of jumping about).
Why are you interested in using games in your classes?
Online games are generally already popular with my young learners and if I can take an authentic game that was specifically designed to be fun and challenging and then spin a language activity into it, then I generally find I’m on to a winner.
What should your audience expect to learn?
A historical look at how different games have engaged us visually and become more narratively complex and how they can be used as a way to practice language structures and language skills work.
What are three words that sum up your session?
Gaming Language Learners
Which other presenter(s) are you looking forward to seeing?
Just about all of them. The trouble I’m going to have is getting round to see as many of them as I can.
