Korean Job Discussion Forums

[jdog2050]

So...this is esl-ish, but I'm hoping that the gamers on the board find this to be a fun little thought exercise. Also, anyone can feel free to use this game. I've played it quite a bit in class in the kids loved it once I made some improvements.

Ok, so this is a game designed to be used with a class' whiteboard. You can use an eboard too I guess.

The game is based on Starcraft. There's three races in Starcraft so you can do this with very large classes by splitting them into huge teams.

The basis of the game is that each team has "life". They must create sentences using categories on the board to earn resource points. The resource points are then "spent" to purchase units. The units attack other teams in order to get the life points down to 0.

So, to create categories, on the board you'd have something like this:

"I want to be..."
"Yesterday, I..."
"My favorite..."
"Random"

The chosen student must create a grammatically perfect sentence to earn a resource point.

To represent the units, I have cut outs of units like marines, zerglings, and zealots. Each unit also has a power rating that determines how much damage it deals when attacking. The most powerful units also use "life" has a resource. Students must decide if they want to keep using smaller units, or saving their rp's and using life points to get the big guns.

Zergling: 1rp, 1p
Marine: 2rp, 2p
Zealot: 3rp, 4p

Ultralisk: 3rp, 4life, 5p
Battlecruiser: 3rp, 5life, 6p
Carrier: 4rp, 5life, 7p

The last category is upgrades. Students can also spend resource points to upgrade the power of all units

3rp: +1power
3rp, 2 life: +2power

Attacking:

The units, which are cut-outs taped to the board, are turned sideways to indicate that they are attacking, similar to Magic: the gathering. Attacking units can not defend. Defending students can use any unturned units to block. Damage is done strictly on a power/power basis. The lesser unit dies. This is unfair I guess but keeps the game rolling along.

Life points:
Zerg have 19 life, Terrans have 20, Protoss have 22.

So that's pretty much that. If you guys need any clarification or have any suggestions lemme know, especially if you're a gamer. It all sounds complicated but the kids pretty much understand it especially since the balancing was done to match the "flavor" of the races.

[Banana_Man]

Puts my "catch the ball and answer a question" game to absolute shame.

[Steelrails]

Wow. Brilliant. Sad, but Brilliant.

[dumpring]

Ahahaha that's awesome man, I hope it's going down well in your school.

Maybe get a big stuffed maplestory character and a stick, when a kid answers a question correctly they can whack it once and get like +1 xp? They can level up at like 10/15/20 xp or something.

[Raeddie]

This sounds fun. I am going to try it for my class. It seems with a smaller class rolling dice could be used to inflict dammage. That would put more luck into the outcome of the game.

[red_devil]

I did something similar except i combined it with Risk to make "Starcraft Risk". I did this game for larger quarterly and mid-term reviews so that i could span a few chapters. I also expanded this into a larger tournament with other teachers where we did class vs. class.

I made big regions like a big map that covered the floor. Each race starts in a region and can conquer and occupy other regions. Doing so results in bonus of additional troops at each round.

First i have a big pool of words, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, etc. that i've taken from the past 2-3 chapters.

To attack a region like in Risk you have an attacker dice, and a defender dice. The number of the dice represents how many words you need to include to create the sentence. If the defender rolls a higher dice they can defend by making a better sentence or by pointing out any grammatical or spelling errors in the sentence created by the attackers.

I've gone a bit more in depth with each race. Each race (Zerg, Terrans, Protoss) have three types of characters with different attributes (soldier, scout, defender). Also you can get a race bonus attribute depending the what you choose. So for example since Protoss are the most technologically advanced they can attack twice in one turn. Whereas the Zerg get an occupation bonus of +3 Zerg for every turn they occupy a region. A race is eliminated when their home region is taken over, or all their troops are killed. A winner is decided when they take over and occupy more than 70% of the map. Prizes included candy/chocolate, some pretty cool Starcraft figurines, movie tickets, SC2 posters, SC books (English), and an actual Risk board game.

As you can imagine it was a ton of work to create but the pay off was pretty huge. It's the single most look forwarded to event for the kids, and has made me pretty popular as well hahaha.

[reactionary]

Obviously an all boys thing. I'm sure the female 40% of my classes wouldn't like it so much.

[misher]

jdog,

That rules. I hope it works out.