Chinese Midterm Madness!

While playing Chinese Midterm Madness!, learners will practice their Chinese character recognition skills.

The game is intended for in-class or at home use to supplement the passive, flash-card based study of Chinese characters.

Chinese Midterm Madness! is designed for beginner-level Chinese-as-a-foreign-language learners who need to rapidly increase their knowledge of Chinese characters. It is geared toward undergraduate students (18-23) who know fewer than 1000 characters and who have a basic grasp of Chinese idiom and culture. Unlike other types of content, Chinese characters require extensive memorization. Learning characters is a labor intensive process that requires periods of flash-card based study. The game's content is gathered from Chinese language courses and texts, and seeks to reinforce basic character recognition skills by contextualizing them within a student's environment.

The game accommodates four players at once, and can be played with three levels of difficulty. One game takes fewer than one hour to complete, and could be incorporated into a classroom environment. The game does not require external arbitration from a subject matter expert, so learners could also play the game at home. The game requires no special preparation beyond board set-up, and no debriefing. However, instructors could offer extra points to winners to encourage students to continue their study of Chinese characters.

The goal of Chinese Midterm Madness! is to arrive first at the center of the board (the University) by answering questions that require recognition of Chinese characters.

This game includes:

Game Board
1 Large Colored Die (with Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Black, and white sides)
Playing Cards
- Five categories (Numbers, Directions, Colors, Foods, and Idioms)
- Three difficulties (Easy, Medium, and Hard)
4 Player Pieces

The game board contains four paths from the board's corners to the board's center. Each path is divided into 30 rectangular spaces. 26 of these squares are Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, or Black. The four squares closest to the center of each path are black and marked with silver stars. This section represents a Business District that requires players to answer four Black questions (idiomatic expressions) before winning the game. This feature reflects the 'danger zone' territories embedded in Chutes and Ladders, Trivial Pursuit, and Monopoly.

Chinese Midterm Madness! requires players to engage in play for less than one hour per game, depending on the knowledge level of the players. Designers purposely kept the play periods short to prevent tiring, frustration, or overload of working memory. Also, rapid game play keeps players interested, engaged, and excited for the 10-15 rounds of play that the game requires.

Hey roomie! Dude! Wake up! That was a crazy party last night, huh? You look wrecked!

Aren't you late for class! I don't know what you were thinking, signing up for a Chinese language class at 8:00AM on a Friday!

Don't you have a midterm today? Did you even study for it? No? You'd better practice your vocab on the way to school.

The Objective: Get from your place at the edge of downtown to the University at the center while practicing your Chinese.

Rules:

Red - Numbers
Blue - Directions
Green - Colors
Yellow - Foods
Black - Chinese Idioms

The design process for Chinese Midterm Madness began when the designers settled on creating a game for Chinese language learners. The designers then asked and answered a number of basic design questions. The first two questions (What should we teach? How should we teach it?) required research to resolve.

To decide what content to incorporate, designers turned to the faculty of the Chinese and Eastern Languages department at SDSU. The faculty member provided a syllabus and the name of their course textbook. After examining the book, designers decided to include five categories of information relevant to the course curriculum. By the eighth week of class, students would have covered colors, numbers, directions, food, and idioms. These subjects formed the core of our content.

To decide on the best method of teaching Chinese to non-native speakers, designers consulted a book on Chinese language learning games. Let's Play Games in Chinese describes a number of different games that teach various type of content. The games fell into several basic categories:

Designers put forth a few first-principles to help narrow the field of game strategies. First, the game must not require external arbitration. The difficulties inherent in teaching and learning Chinese require that students have a reliable source of feedback on their tones and writing strokes. If a tone is misplaced, or a character's stroke order is incorrect, then native speakers may fail to understand the student. Therefore, a board game may not satisfy those needs without an external resource (web site, cd-rom, computer, etc.).

The remaining strategies (writing games, speed games, path games, and identification games) seemed reasonable forms for a language game. This brought about two rounds of prototyping.

The First Prototype

The first prototype for Chinese Midterm Madness went through a single iteration before the designers abandoned it. In this first game, learners would race one another to write the Chinese character associated with an English word. It combined elements of speed games with the writing game format. Unfortunately, this design was universally judged 'unfun' and 'boring.' Even more, the game required an arbiter to determine a victor. The intensive role that a skilled arbiter would play meant that the design needed further development.

The Second Prototype

At the outset of this second prototype, the designers chose to create a game that would help first-year Chinese language students master the difficult task of learning to read words and phrases in Chinese characters. This came from a need recognized during one designer's trip to China. There, he had met many European, North American, South American, and Asian students who struggled with Chinese language courses. Their classes required great amounts of memorization and regurgitation of information. Most students took to using flashcards to learn to recognize dozens of characters and phrases.

The designer also met a Canadian expatriot who had learned to read and speak Chinese very competently in her year in Shanghai. She noted that her favorite way to practice the lessons presented in her language classes was to use them and recognize information in context. She would say the names of foods, colors, numbers, and directions as she walked down the street. She would practice idioms regularly with local speakers. She brought her new knowledge with her into her world and made use of it.

Chinese language students in this country do not have the benefit of daily practice with native speakers. However, it seems plausible to suppose that this strategy can be adapted to the American student's world. By associating Chinese characters with things in their world, American students could better retain and contextualize their knowledge.

Designers set about turning this principle into a game. The most direct way to contextualize knowledge within a game is to create a story. The most direct way to involve a learner in that story is to make them part of it. Thus, the second prototype took on a role-playing element. The player must recognize the Chinese characters within the context of an activity.

To make the activity relevant and fun for undergraduate university students, the designers chose to adopt an informal tone and to emulate the learners' world. These two factors will help learners to connect their lessons in Chinese to their own world, and so make the experience more vivid, authentic, and useful.

Along the way, the designers examined a number of board games from the standpoint of field probability and systemic structure. They examined the various structures of Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Battle Ship, card games, chess, Dungeons and Dragons, and others to determine what affordances to adapt to their game. In the end, designers found that games such as Monopoly dealt primarily with resource allocation and management, and therefore occupied a significant amount of the user's working memory with non-Chinese language information. Designers next considered a trivia style format, but found the results unsatisfying. Combat-style games (such as chess or checkers) also failed to offer the necessary affordances for content based on Chinese characters.

(The designers did note that the Chinese games Xiangqi, or Elephant Chess, and MahJong often uses Chinese characters inscribed on tiles. However, those games also followed combat game and 2-D puzzle game formats that restricted the kinds of content that designers could graft onto them.)

The designers eventually settled on a path-style game with role-playing qualities. They hoped that a game with a strong story element that relates to students' daily life would draw learners into the game and involve them at a visceral level.

Designers then consulted a beginner-level Chinese language textbook to determine what content to include in the game. They found that the textbook emphasized content such as numbers, colors, foods, directions, and idioms. The designers decided that these content categories formed a representative body of knowledge that a student would need to understand signs and written communication while in China. They then assigned a primary color or shade to each type of content. Designers created questions that focused on students' quotidian life so that students can better relate their learning in Chinese to real world events and objects. This decision came from contemporary research in cognitive science and game design that supports the use of familiar scenarios to increase skills transference and knowledge retention.

From these early decisions, the designers created a story where students must rush to an 8:00AM, Friday Chinese language class where they have a midterm. In the story, the students neglected to study and spent Thursday night partying. They must then practice their Chinese on the way to class. This is a familiar story to any undergraduate at a large university.

Designers then created a simple, path-based board that lead users from their 'homes' (stars at the corners of the board) to the university at the center. Students move on the board using a die (initially numbered, but eventually colored) that would indicate how many spaces to move. The game becomes increasingly difficult towards the university as players pass through the 'Business District' that occupies the last four spaces before the university on each path. There, players must answer four idiom cards in order to win. Idiom cards require students to know a number of common phrases in Chinese. At the Hard level, these include multi-character phrases that native speakers commonly use, such as performing an action 'with wisdom and courage,' or 'a failure is the mother of a success'. Designers borrowed this concept from Chutes and Ladders, where victory becomes more difficult towards the end of the game as the occurrence of chutes increases in frequency.

In terms of graphic design, the designers decided that college students would best respond to two graphic styles: elaborate and realistic, or cartoonish and simple. Due to time and budget restraints, the designers used a highly stylized and impressionistic board drawn in oil pastel. The designers then used clip-art of buildings and plants to create the idea of an abstract urban environment.

In the final stages of development, the designers user-tested the game. Users enjoyed the game's premise and role playing elements. Unfortunately, test users lacked any significant knowledge of Chinese characters, and so could not fully critique the experience. However, several users criticized the lack of variant game play modes. This inspired the designers to add two additional groups of cards to each type of question: Medium, and Hard level questions. These questions allow users of different proficiency levels to play against each other. It also allows users continue playing the game as their skill levels advance.

At the close of this project, the designers realize that they have learned a pair of valuable lessons. First, the media is the message. The way a game is designed and built directly influences the way learners interact with the content. This basic understanding of how game play relates to content allowed the designers to make smarter choices about their design. Second, meta-cognitive awareness of game play is not always desirable. The designers of Chinese Midterm Madness! attempted to reduce the number of game tools, and so reduce the amount of working memory preoccupied with anything but Chinese characters. Memorizing chinese characters is difficult enough without managing resources at the same time.

In the end, the designers believe that the game offers students a new way to practice their language skills in a novel, enginging, and fun way.

McNaughton, W. (2005). Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition. New York, New York: Tuttle Publishing.
Yao, T.-C., McGinnis, Scott. (2002). Let's Play Games in Chinese! Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company.