Originally posted on my language blog, Nihon on the Go.
Tag: language
My First Video Game
For class last week, we had to design a lesson by making a video game. After spending hours with Game Star Mechanic, I finally gave up. It seemed literally impossible to get the things that I needed to make my lesson–one of the items being text. It gave me a renewed disdain for questing games like this. I never have really liked those kinds of games, so to have to do one in a short period of time was very annoying. While I like video games, I only have so much patience for them before I give up. In the end, I switched to Sploder, a very straightforward and simple-to-use video game maker. I liked it because there was no scripting or coding, no trying to figure out where things go, and best of all, no questing for essential building blocks!
Here is my lesson on Japanese particles. It was so much fun to build all these worlds using the retro game creator!
Introduction to Japanese Kanji
Ten Word Postcard
I got this idea from teachworkoutlove, who did a 10-word postcard. Looking at the scene around you, describe it in 10 words or phrases and list them on a piece of paper like a poem. I thought it would be fun to do mine in Japanese.
交通 Traffic
スカイライン
Skyline
どこかへ通う人
People commuting to somewhere
何度も繰り返す曲
The same song repeating over and over
携帯を見てるドライバー
Drivers looking at their phones
空想
Daydreams
長い
Long
眠い
Sleepy
白空
White sky
遅い車と速い車
Slow and fast cars
マイペース
My own pace
Better than a Post-It Note: Doodling
“Most of the inventions that the company relies on even today emerged from those periods of…experimental doodling,” author Daniel Pink wrote of the success of McKnight’s hands-off management style.
Doodling is often seen as a sign of boredom. At least for me, who was an avid doodler in college, it was. While the teacher was lecturing, I would be practicing kanji or drawing cute little pastries in the corners of my notebook. It wasn’t until I took a class on violent weather that I started drawing doodles relevant to the lecture. I thought it was so fun to picture high and low pressure systems as cute little faces and cold fronts as bad attitude triangles overtaking the laid-back and easy-going warm fronts. Looking back on that, I realized that doodling made the concept of weather more interesting, especially in a static lecture class. The doodles I drew spoke much louder than the words I wrote, what I read, or what I was heard. It made me more interested in the class. I was so fascinated, my professor thought I was a science major; he was shocked to find out I was majoring in interior design.
For myself, I have always been a visual learner, because I love drawing, art, crafts, photography, etc. Lately, I’ve been looking into different learning styles using Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory. The theory roughly states that in each individual exists different intelligences in different capacities and that they use these intelligences to solve problems, create products, and consume information. These intelligences are visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, naturalistic, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Unfortunately, in schools, however, there is a bias toward the verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences, leading me to believe that school is for an exclusive type of learner, but that is not the focus today.
What if we could get students excited about what they’re learning by casually weaving in another element? What if we could make that information stick harder than a Post-It note? Have you considered doodling–that is visual notetaking/sketchnoting? A product of the visual-spatial intelligence.
With anything, though, I like to test it out on myself first. I study Japanese in my spare time, and I’ve been studying for about eight years. Until recently, I realized that regular note-taking had become tiring and boring, especially when I hit the “plateau”–when the language-learning process slows and curls into a rut. After being inspired by the “studyblrs” (study Tumblrs) on Tumblr and seeing these beautifully organized notebooks decorated with washi tape, gel pins, photographs, and handwritten fonts, I decided to jump on the visual-notetaking bandwagon. I thought this was a wonderful idea to encourage creativity and motivation to actually learn the material.
Tech Girl 