Learning and Games and Learning Games

Did a bunch more work on my Greek teaching game the last couple of days. (No new screenshots, though — most of the changes have been improvements to the complexity of gameplay, but not visible in a shot.)

I’m sure my ActionScript is annoyingly naive and that I will hate it once I’ve done a few more projects. I’m so used to Inform, and being able to envision exactly what I need to write before I start typing anything, that it’s novel to go back to a context where I have to laboriously piece out how to do something, figuring out each step in turn. (Well, it could be worse. There are a lot of basic universal programming concepts that don’t have to be figured out from scratch.)

At the same time, it’s awesome finally to be able to construct my own Flash game. I’ve played so many of these things over the years that it’s like I’ve been mutely listening to a language and am now finally able to try speaking it back.

I’m still futzing with the gameplay.

The thing I need to teach here is how Greek vowel sounds combine. Greek is an inflected language, which means that nouns and verbs take on different endings depending on their grammatical function. For instance, “I teach” is expressed with a single word, παιδεύω, with the verb stem παιδεύ- meaning “teach” and the verb ending -ω meaning “a first person singular subject does this”. To say “he teaches” instead, you keep the same stem and replace the ending with the third person singular ending: παιδεύει.

The point where this gets tricky is that the personal endings all start with vowels. And some verb stems end with vowels. When that happens, sometimes the vowel from the verb stem combines with the vowels in the personal endings — so the verb with the stem δηλό- and the personal ending -εις does NOT become δηλόεις, but combines those vowels together into δηλοῖς.

There are a host of different rules governing how the vowel contraction happens depending on whether the verb stem ends with α, ε, or ο, and which subsequent sounds that vowel is being blended into.

This makes my students very sad. They spend the first part of the term learning those charts of personal endings, and then suddenly they’re presented with a new set of verbs that don’t conform. They can then either (a) learn all the complicated rules governing vowel contraction or (b) memorize as a paradigm an example of each type (that is, one α verb, one ε verb, and one ο verb). Either way, it’s a lot of memorizing, and it can feel kind of senseless.

The approach of the game is the first one: teach the vowel contraction rules themselves. (That’s better, anyway, because vowel contraction also happens with certain Greek nouns, so it’s nicest just to be able to apply the rules over again.) I think I’ve now got a sequence of levels — about 50 in all, though they’re mostly quite brief to play — that step the player through the vowel contraction rules and then reinforce, reinforce, reinforce until they start to seem second-nature. A student should, after playing the game, be able to predict what will result from any pair of vowel sounds being combined together — or, conversely, look at a combined sound and work out what pairs could have produced that sound.

What is currently missing from the game is practice deciphering these combinations in the context of actual Greek words. Without that, I worry that the knowledge gained from the game may not transfer back to actual reading as automatically as it should.

For a while I was thinking about adding a secondary mini-game every few levels, but I dislike that thought for two reasons. One, I couldn’t think of a mini-game mechanic for that part that didn’t basically boil down to a lame multiple-choice quiz — and if your mini-game has a lame mechanic, it shouldn’t exist. And two, my Flash skills may be improving, but it would still be an annoying amount of work to add on a different kind of screen with a different kind of interaction interleaved with the main game, and I’d rather not if I can avoid it.

I have now thought of a way to work this into the main mechanic instead, I think. It’s yet another feature that will make the game simply impenetrable to people who aren’t Greek students, but then, I wasn’t particularly looking to score a big hit on Kongregate anyway.