Learning Chinese is hard. Teaching Chinese is probably even harder. Nobody has the time to practice writing each Chinese character a thousand times and the boring task only makes students hate learning Chinese even more.
So, what is a good Chinese teacher supposed to do? You make the students want to learn. You make learning Chinese meaningful and you make learning Chinese fun.
Students love games because they are fun. I used to make games for the students to play. It takes me hours to make one game, but we play it one time and the game is done.
You can also make the games on Kahoot, Quizlet, or Blooklet. But you can’t play the same game every day. There is also a loophole. Some students just play to play. They guess. At the end of the game, they just didn’t learn anything.
Making their own games
So, I decided to have the students make their own games on Google Slides. We used BookCreator to write the Chinese characters by hand. We wrote the Chinese characters three times. Students wrote the first character correctly. The second one had an extra stroke. The last character was missing a stroke.
They took screenshots of each Chinese character and added it to a slide. Students asked which Chinese character was written correctly. This forced students to pay attention to Chinese characters that might look similar.
We created one slide if the player guessed incorrectly. Students then prompted the players to go back to the first question and try again. If they guessed correctly, they moved on to the next question. Finally they created a slide to congratulate the player for winning the game.
Chinese and technology
Students learned 20th century technology skills while making their games. They learned how to add text, images, and links to their slides.
When they finished, students hosted their own game. They practiced their Chinese skills orally. The students at their desks raised their hands to answer questions. Then I ensured one hundred percent participation by having students write their answers on a whiteboard.
Although not all students finished their assignments, I feel the assignment was a success since my main goal was for students to practice their Chinese. Once all students develop the same computer skills, the assignment shouldn’t be such a challenge and we can focus on practicing more and more Chinese with a fun game.