Putting a Playful Spin on Literary Analysis
Literary analysis and writing are fundamental abilities that students should learn at any level of English Language Arts. Many high school teachers struggle with designing rigorous, differentiated assessment approaches that are also relevant and engaging to students during writing instruction and literary analysis. One fascinating approach is to leverage the concept of developing adventure games to educate and analyze literary analysis and narrative composition.
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Students design adventure games in which players can choose their own experience using stories and material from a narrative writing unit or by analyzing a text. This technique challenges students to think critically about arranging and synthesizing their information into a functional structure for gameplay in addition to analyzing texts and writing.
RIGOR OF THE ASSIGNMENT SHOULD BE DETERMINED BY STUDENT NEEDS.
Students are tasked with constructing a choose-your-own-adventure game that reflects some component of education linked to writing and text analysis for this assignment. This technique can be differentiated based on rigor levels with different student levels. One strategy to distinguish this task is to concentrate on a variety of textual aspects. Teachers can identify which aspects of text analysis are difficult for their pupils and focus on improving those skills.
When constructing an evaluation, teachers, for example, could concentrate on one method (such as summarizing a text). If their students required a more intense focus, teachers may mix various skills into a single game experience. Students could be asked to assess the setting and plot in a single gaming script. This would increase the level of analysis required for game development.
Another option to differentiate assignment rigor is to request an additional written assessment. Students crafted a narrative and designed an adventure game for my Beowulf projects. If it is too demanding for pupils, teachers could modify the assignment so that the adventure game serves as the narrative writing itself. Scaffolding is also important in differentiating this job.
Higher-level pupils may not require as much structure or scaffolding during the process. However, some students may require more structure when completing the project. Teachers can help these children by generating outlines or templates that they can fill in with their own thoughts. Instead of having to create everything from scratch, this gives pupils a base to work with.
STUDENTS CAN CREATE THEIR GAME WITH HIGH- OR LOW-TECH OPTIONS.
This activity can be done with or without the help of technology. Students can use technology to their advantage by developing games on presentation tools such as Google Slides and including links that aid in gameplay. Students can also utilize code to develop their own game websites. If technology is unavailable, students can always play their games on paper. On paper cards, several games scenarios can be made. Students can even design their own board games to accompany their experiences.
Students design this game using either technology or paper to reflect their analysis of a text. Students in my practice used Google Slides to design their games. The kids made the game by using hyperlinked slides to help the player navigate through their story or game. Players navigated the presentation and engaged in several courses of play to investigate the text analysis in a story style.
THE LITERARY FEATURES OF THE ASSIGNED STORIES CAN BE ANALYZED BY GAMES.
In my Honors English III STEM class, I used gamification as the foundation for my Edgar Allan Poe writings. Students were challenged to build games based on these well-known stories. They had a choice between "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." In class, we read and discussed these stories. Following that analysis, students were challenged to develop games that assessed the plot and other literary elements of their chosen stories. Each game has to include a choose-your-own-adventure style so that players could take numerous courses through the game. Each linked option led the player through a separate section of the game's story.
The emphasis of their games was on building a distinct scenario that related to their chosen Poe narrative. They had to contain detailed images as well as distinct characters from the plot. One of my students concentrated on the imagery and location of "The Masque of the Red Death" by building a game in which you clicked through the many rooms of the story's mansion. By clicking on the symbolic rooms, players might move through many situations.
Another group created a game using coding and hyperlinks in which the player walked through the house in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and gathered objects in each room.
STUDENTS' ORIGINAL NARRATIVE STORIES CAN BE USED TO CREATE GAMES.
Another time I used gamification to improve my instruction and assessment was during a Heroes unit. We covered heroic archetypes in my English 4 College Prep class, utilizing Beowulf as our anchor text. Students researched a British time period, event, or prominent person and then constructed their hero based on their findings.
The kids then used their information and the hero they developed to construct a narrative fiction. Students choose various topics such as knights, Vikings, the Victorian era, and even Queen Elizabeth. Then, based on their hero and plot, they designed a choose-your-own-adventure game. The games were created to take various paths for its hero's journey. Players might choose multiple adventures for the hero, interactions with other people, and so on.
For this project, the students might collaborate by writing similar stories with various characters and then creating a game based on their characters. We asked students, administrators, and other teachers to come play their games when the pupils finished theirs. We also asked students from nearby English courses to join us in the fun. We devoted a whole class time to this gameplay event. It was an excellent technique to publicize the pupils' learning.
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