One of the challenges we as teachers face during online teaching is how to avoid monotony. How can we stop our students becoming bored by the same type of task, lesson structure and mode of communication? Equally, it sometimes feels as if energy and enthusiasm that we have come to expect from our pupils, when transferred online, becomes as fragile as a balloon – slow to cultivate, but easy to burst.
It follows that the opening moments of a lesson are key to its success – and where better to build enthusiasm than with a game?
The Roman elite turned their noses up at games. In the 4th Century AD, Ammianus Marcellinus writes that the Roman plebs, hanging out in wine shops, would:
“quarrel with one another in their dice games, making a disgusting sound by drawing back their breath into their snuffling nostrils…This kind of thing stops anything memorable or serious from being done in Rome.”
Now, whilst no one would want to put up with snuffling nostrils in our classrooms, educators such as Zapata-Rivera and Bauer argue that games can boost students’ engagement and learning, rather than stifling it. It is during these games, where in a sense the stakes are lower, that some of the quieter members of my classes particularly come into their own.
So I’ve taken inspiration from the following board games and TV shows in my lessons:
1. Noughts and Crosses / Tic-Tac-Toe
A game known to most, but with a twist. To gain a X or an O on the chosen square, students must answer the question on that square correctly (here a simple Latin to English or English to Latin question).
I split the class into two teams, and call upon a member of a team to decide where they want to move. Their teammates then chime in on the call, discussing game strategy and sharing the forms they do know.
So far so recognisable, but here’s the twist. If Team A gets a question wrong, Team B has one attempt at answering Team A’s question, before moving on to their own move. The rule can create palpable hesitation in the ranks, ensuring students think carefully about their answers.
The game asks students to retrieve either learning from previous lessons or an understanding of topics which are prerequisite to the lesson that I am about to teach. I designed the board above to scaffold students’ introduction to the imperfect of adsum and absum, reckoning that, once they remembered erant, ab and ad, the paradigms aberam and aderam would be more accessible.
2. Only Connect
A recent addition to my online classroom, inspired by a friend’s weekly zoom quiz, is a board of Only Connect.
Split the groups into teams of 4, send them into breakout rooms, and have them race against each other to figure out the four different groups of four, and what unites those groups. In the above grid, I wanted students to recognise and categorise different forms of ille, illa, illud, is, ea, id and hic, haec, hoc. You could increase the challenge by grouping according to case/gender/number, or adding a bonus question to answer (perhaps something that unites one form from each of the four groups). Again, the game enables you to revisit content necessary for the lesson ahead.
The game works equally well when used with set texts in the Sixth Form. The board below challenged a Sixth Form student to refresh her understanding of Virgil’s Aeneid XII, and led to a handy recap of divine intervention, similes, and the role of death in the Aeneid.
3. Articulate
A classic, although perhaps more appropriate for smaller classes. Split the groups into 2 teams and paste 8-10 terms onto two or three members of each team’s OneNote in advance of the lesson. These cards could ask students to describe all manner of things Classical to their teammates, from minor characters in their set texts to Latin vocabulary, or the finer points of accidence / syntax. Students must describe the term to their teammates, who must guess as many correct terms in 60 seconds.
I hope that these ideas may be of some use this term, and may inspire you to gamify your classrooms, whether online or in person!
