For the course EDPE-4335, Seminar and Curriculum of Learning at the Elementary 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 literacy and oral 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 Flower Petal Picking Game, which placed special emphasis on syllable recognition and word formation. In our game, elementary school students are provided with a word by the teacher and given petals that have different syllables written on them. The students are then told to arrange the petals/syllables in the correct order to reconstruct the word provided by the teacher, which will end up forming a flower in the end. The use of this game in the classroom setting is backed up by several credible theories and approaches, such as gamification in education, phonological awareness, multisensory learning, etc. One of our classmates had the opportunity to pilot this game in a real classroom with young students and it was a huge success, as the students became very invested and excited about it. When we presented it during the symposium, we asked for volunteers who wanted to play the game so we could demonstrate it and a few of our classmates happily did. The volunteers were able to easily follow the instructions and complete the flower while having fun in the process. In general, our research and our game were well received, 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 elementary school students, there were also students from another course presenting their research and games for secondary 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 about phonetic awareness and vowel sounds, in which students learn about short and long vowel sounds by imitating the sounds different animals make. Another one I really liked was Linguistics Hot Potato, in which the students played Hot Potato and whoever ended up with the potato in their hand would have to answer a question related to parts of speech.

 

     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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