| Body | By Isabelle Sackville-West
The goal of this activity is to illustrate one way to integrate ARIS, a free platform for creating place-based mobile games to play on iOS devices, into the classroom. In this activity, groups of novice students will work together to create an ARIS game in which players must practice greeting and leave-taking with a character.
Learning Objectives: Students will be able to…
- Identify formulaic greeting and leave-taking expressions.
- Determine the appropriateness of greeting and leave-taking expressions.
- Select appropriate greeting and leave-taking responses in an augmented reality (AR) setting.
Modes: Interpretive, Presentational, and Intercultural Communication (Investigate)
Materials Needed: Conversation Tree Template, at least one iPhone per group, the ARIS app, at least one computer per group
Procedure:
- Provide an overview of greetings and leave-takings in the target language. This can be done through a dialogue, videos, teacher modeling, etc. Make sure that the context and responses are authentic in that they accurately represent real-world interactions.
- As a class, brainstorm and make lists about the types of greetings/leave-takings one would use with people of different relations to themselves. These people might include
- Someone in power, like your boss or teacher
- A family member
- A friend
- Someone younger than you
- Next, divide the class into several groups, probably no more than 3 or 4 people per group.
- Introduce the task: Students will be creating an AR dialogue game in which players need to select appropriate responses to have a felicitous outcome. Then they will be playing one another’s games.
- Have each group select a character and context in which they would like their dialogue to take place, e.g. Group 1: clerk at a grocery store; Group 2: talking to a teacher in the hallway, etc.
- For their selected context, have each group brainstorm their script using the Conversation Tree Template. For each turn, there should be both pragmatically appropriate and inappropriate responses, and there should be at least three turns in total (Greeting, transition, leave-taking). An example is below.
- e.g. Teacher on the first day of class says, "How are you?"
- You respond
- Good, what about you?
- Fine. How are you?
- Great!
- Not great, actually. (In this instance, iv. is not pragmatically appropriate because asking “how are you” is generally just an opener and therefore should be responded too somewhat shallowly/formulaically unless the interlocutor is close with you.)
- Next, students will need to familiarize themselves with ARIS. A great place to start is with the tutorials on their webpage:
- http://manual.arisgames.org/ - Link to the home page on how to make games with ARIS
- http://manual.arisgames.org/tutorials/aris101 - Step by step process on basic structures of
- Once students feel comfortable with ARIS, it’s time for them to start building their game! This game will be pretty simple to make because it only involves one character and a dialogue.
- Once the students are finished building their game, have them download the app on an iPhone and play their game themselves to verify that it works the way they want it to.
- Then have all of the groups play one another’s games and note the questions and responses they encounter. To do so, have them use fresh Conversation Tree Templates, just filling out for the path they select. Have them write out each response and circle the one they selected. Also, have them underline the ones they think are not pragmatically appropriate and briefly state why.
Notes:
- The Conversation Tree Template is taken from the STARTALK Bridging Course and was developed by Ben Pearson.
- Later Games2Teach will come out with an entire ARIS Teacher Resource, so keep an eye out if you are interested in implementing ARIS in your classroom!
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