This sounds neat. It’d exercise both their creativity and their language skills. You could have challenges where they have to solve a certain problem, or even have Wizard’s Duels where the students pair off against each other and try to counter one another’s spells (like in “The Sword in the Stone”).

It might be helpful to have them put together “spellbooks” in the form of flash cards that have nouns, verbs and modifiers on them, plus maybe a symbol or other visual representation. I don’t know how you’d do that without making it too easy, though.

Hi Hilary

What a great idea. I think your system is feasible, but without more detail, I’m not sure how effective it will be. Are you talking about a classroom situation, a homeschooling lesson, or just a rulebook game for parents or teachers to use at their own discretion? I think that each learning situation has a slightly different approach.

Also, is the RPG intended solely to teach language, or is it a teaching RPG, and you want to add language to it?

I think you would have to set up many, many opportunities to cast spells in the selected language for it to really be effective. There’s a tug of war between how fun is the game and how educational is the game. I think your example would be more fun than educational. To gain fluency, kids would have to have a huge spell range and be using them often. It could work if magic is as commonplace as in the Harry Potter book. Instead of the Latinate phrases that Rowling uses for spells, it could be actual phrases, and the act of learning a spell means really learning how to pronounce the sentence in the language. This gets into the larp realm, my specialty.

When UCLA ran the Hogwarts larp in 2001, students would take classes just like in teh boojk: potions, charms, transfigurations, etc. And in each class, they would learn–for real–how to cast a spell. Some involved waving your wand a certain way, others involved pronouncing a word correctly. You could use this same method, but again, they should be casting that spell or spells often.

Just as an alternative, what if you used French (or whatever language you want to teach) as an actual language in the fictional world? What if the Kingdom of Francois had NPCs who only spoke French, and players, they had to interact with you (as a GM) in French during some role play encounters? And role play out that they don’t know the language, so the ambassador or quest list on the tavern wall could help them with translation, but as they adventure on, they get less and less help. Or, what if the “thieves’ cant” or “alignment language” or even Elvish or Dwarvish or Orc is the language you want to teach?

I agree with your idea to allow students to make up their own spells or phrases, so once they know “I summon”, they can then expand the spell by learning different objects to summon.

I hope this helps. Great idea, good luck!

Aaron

I am working on a similar project actually. The idea came from a generic “shopping” vocabulary/role play lesson I have to teach soon. I decided that it would be much more fun and meaning full if students actually shopped for items like food, armour and weapons for their character with the idea that they then use their characters in a PvP battle the following week.

I came up with a whole armour and weapon effectivity vs durability system but never even thought about spells. Your idea has made me reconsider how I’m going to do the PvP system now. Thanks!

I’ve been thinking about something similar for quite awhile. What would be most instrumental to the game’s success (in teaching), I think, would not be the spell learning/casting portion but other, more subtle ways of teaching. For instance, early in the game, NPCs would speak mostly English, with the occasional French words thrown in. The student could then use context clues to learn the word, often without much conscious thought. As the game progresses, the NPCs would speak French more and more. The same concept could be applied to signs in towns, banners, etc.

The strength in this approach is that, from the student’s point of view, the language is a means to an end and not an end itself; in other words, they’re learning the language to continue playing the game. It also covers 2 of the 3 important areas of learning a new language: reading it, and hearing it spoken aloud. In order to cover the last area- speaking the language- would require some sort of recognition software, such that the student/player is speaking his/her spells into a microphone. If the game allows the student/player to have ally NPCs, these entities could only speak and understand French, such that the student must seek to further their knowledge in order to express more complicated strategies to these characters. Using natural language processing, these NPCs could perhaps even respond to the player in French, rounding out the experience.

Let’s make it happen! I can provide input from a teenage gamer’s perspective!

What’s the first step? I think the game should have rewards for upping language skill but the rewards do not necessarily have to be related to language (could improve combat or money-making skills)…I think we could form a solid idea and petition WoW or Runescape potentially.

Given that (from our view) the focus is on teaching the language (this is not to say that gameplay should be watered down), the mechanics or “language” of the RPG itself should be designed to get out of the player’s way as much as possible. Like a pick-up-and-play sort of design or “simple to play, difficult to master”.

Take the Pokemon series, for example. Most players (I’d say about 70-85%) don’t know about the underlying concepts of EVs, IVs, etc. but these difficult concepts ARE available for players to manipulate and master.

Bring that ideology to Hillary’s IP: if the game can be designed in such a way that the RPG fundamentals are simple enough for anyone to grasp yet contain enough depth to keep long-time players engaged, there isn’t much of a limit as far as how much of the language the game can teach. Whereas it could take up to 5 years of practice to be fluent in a given language, a game like this could successfully translate the player’s competitive nature, inability to refrain from reaching ONE MORE LEVEL before bed time, etc. then this could really work.

I created a simple battle RPG for my students and although it isn’t quite to the depth of the conversation here, it was a success in terms of getting students to use the target language. A quick write up of the project can be seen here: http://yorksensei.posterous.com

It could be fleshed out by having groups design not only a character, but also a playable world for their opponents’ character to traverse (in a D&D style game).