For the course EDPE-4005, Seminar and Curriculum at the Secondary Level, I had the chance to participate in an Educational Innovations Symposium.​ Participating in the Educational Innovations Symposium was an experience I will never forget, and one which will certainly impact my career as a future ESL educator. As part of this course, I was assigned to a group of four people, in which we were tasked to work together to research how games can be used as a tool in ESL classrooms to improve oral fluency and communication. Then, we would have to come up with our own game and justify its use in the classroom setting by ensuring that it was grounded in credible sources. Our research and a demonstration of our game would later be presented at the Educational Innovations Symposium, alongside other groups of students who were working on this project as well.

 

     My group designed the Pronunciation Detectives game, which placed special emphasis on correct pronunciation and intonation in the English language. In our game, secondary school students are divided into teams of 4-5 participants and given a mystery scenario to solve. In the classroom, the teacher will prepare five themed stations where each team will have to pass by and draw character role cards, completing pronunciation and intonation challenges at each one in order to solve the mystery. The use of this game in the classroom setting is backed up by several credible theories and approaches, such as Communicative Language Teaching, Task-Based Learning, Role-Playing Pedagogy, etc. When we presented our game during the symposium, we asked for a volunteer who wanted to role-play one of the stations of the game so we could demonstrate it. One of our classmates happily did, being able to easily follow the instructions and complete the challenge while having fun in the process. In general, our research and our game were well received by the attendants of the symposium, which made my partners and I very satisfied.

 

     Watching our classmates present their research and games was also a very enjoyable experience for me. Although the students enrolled in this course focused on games for secondary school students, there were also students from another course presenting their research and games for elementary students in the symposium. Listening to their research and participating as a volunteer in some game demonstrations helped me learn a lot about different games that can be used for educational purposes. Some of these games were very creative, and I believe I would not have been able to come up with them myself, so I am glad I was able to find out about them through my classmates. One of my favorites was an activity similar to ours, in which students had to role-play as a hiring manager and interviewee, providing a fantastic opportunity for secondary school students to develop fluency in the English language while simultaneously practicing for job interviews they may have in the near future as young adults. Another one I really liked was a game in which the students were provided with three cups and asked to throw a ping pong ball into one of them. Depending on which cup the ball landed in, they would be asked a question about grammar that they would have to answer correctly in order to earn points. There were different amounts of points and questions with varying difficulty assigned to each cup. 

 

     Conducting research and designing a game alongside my peers was a great experience. It taught me how to develop strategies that will help my future students with their specific needs in a way that is both fun and grounded in credible sources. I am certain that I will be able to apply the skills I learned while working on this project in my future career as an ESL teacher. Witnessing my classmates' presentations has also sparked my imagination and inspired me to develop and implement games like theirs with my future students. All in all, this was a very interesting and beneficial experience for me, which I will probably cherish for the rest of my life.

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