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From http://fltmag.com/gamification-strategies-for-tesol-students-stem/

Gamification Strategies for TESOL Students in STEM Fields
by Russell Moon and Nick Einterz
November 14, 2014

“At the University of Colorado Boulder’s International English Center (IEC), students from all over the world develop their English proficiency and academic skills with the intention of studying at a university in the United States. A significant number of these students intend to study engineering.

“… Since vocational identity seems to play an important role in motivating students to succeed in their English studies, the IEC has begun offering upper-level, content-based science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) courses.

“These courses aim to develop students’ proficiency in academic English by offering them the opportunity to study English in the context of their chosen field. Founded upon research-supported curriculum design that ensures content accuracy, such courses provide an opportunity for students to engage in authentic engineering practices, such as project planning and implementation. This article presents the curricular design for a project-based STEM course, ‘English for Engineering,’ and reviews our approaches to teaching the course and staging the course within Desire2Learn (D2L), the University of Colorado Boulder’s course management system.

“… In our case, students were presented with two project options: build a virtual structure using Minecraft, a popular computer-based sandbox game, or design and construct a physical Rube Goldberg machine.”

Read the full article at http://fltmag.com/gamification-strategies-for-tesol-students-stem/