Trace Effects--Serious Games in L2 class

According to the Wiki,  'Serious_Games are simulations of real-world events or processes designed for the purpose of solving a problem. Although serious games can be entertaining, their main purpose is to train or educate users, though it may have other purposes, such as marketing or advertisement. Serious game will sometimes deliberately sacrifice fun and entertainment in order to achieve a desired progress by the player. Serious games are not a game genre but a category of games with different purposes. This category includes some educational games and advergames, political games, or evangelical games. Serious games are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education'. Among all kinds of the serious games, I think Trace-Effects is a great video game for both foreign language learning and teaching.

Trace Effects is an online video game for learning American English and culture. It is produced by the US Department of State. It is geared toward young people, ages from 12 to 16. Trace Effects exposes users to American society and explores themes related to entrepreneurship, science and innovation, empowering women, community activism and conflict resolution. Since my future students are supposed to be middle school students, I think this game is beneficial for my students to improve their English proficiency especially in speaking and listening. It also provides a great opportunity for the learners to get to know more about American culture and the college school atmosphere. As a problem solving game, Trace Effects has seven main chapters, and the task from each chapter is related to the next chapter. In each of the chapter, the players are asked to finish tasks like finding some places of the campus or to find certain people. To fulfill the task players have to talk to people to gain the necessary information. I've played this game only one time, but it takes almost two hours to finish all these chapters.

The language learning objective for this game is to enable the learners to get familiar with the American society and themes related to the campus life. After playing the game several times the students will get sense of the basic facilities of the American campus, they should also know who and where they can go for asking help when they meet  problems in American colleges. There are three main  methods for me to assess my learning objective. First of all, I can exam their playing speed, usually the quicker they finish the game, the better they understand the game and the themes related to American Society. Secondly, I can ask the students to  pause the game when there is a conversation in the game, I will ask them to talk to me instead. In this way I can know whether they have learned how to talk about these topics exactly. Finally, I may ask my students to write an self-reflection, asking them to write down the useful topics from the game and how do they feel about American university. Maybe this task is challenging for the middle school students , but I will try to make it more easier for them.