I finally got my PC laptop working again briefly (before it gave up on life again), so I was able to have a play with Teacher Invaders, the new free game from Andrew Field, the teacher behind ContentGenerator.net. All you need to do to start creating your own games is to download a small programme and away you go. Click here to play the game to test your knowledge of basic Spanish words, it’s very easy, even for those of you who are, how can I put it? …hispanically challenged (nobody’s perfect), all you have to do is read the Spanish and type in the English.
As it was suggested in a previous post, these games are fantastic to be played individually by pupils on their own computers or to put the interaction into the Interactive Whiteboard, by getting the pupils off their chairs and play the game on the board, which imbues the lesson with a sense of competition and it instantly becomes a more memorable and enjoyable learning experience.
ContentGenerator.net specialises in game generators with classic games on offer, such as Fling the Teacher or Penalty Shoot-out. Not all of the games are free, but they are very reasonably priced and I shall be buying them myself for www.AsiSeHace.net, my Spanish revision website, as soon as I get Windows installed on my Mac.
Just before I go, I’d like to make a comment about the game, constructive criticism if you like: although it is fantastic that the game supports foreign and accented characters (like ñ or á), as a languages teacher, I always find that it is important to give clear instructions to the player on how to answer the questions in addition to the game’s title, for example: conjugate in the first person singular or use the definite article, so perhaps this facility is something that can be added to the games in the future.
