Once you have chosen a game to play, you will be taken to the Game Settings page. This is where you can change the default settings for the game to better match your needs. The game settings allow you to customize the game in a variety of ways. You can refine your choice of questions or words which will help you to differentiate for your learners. You can control the difficulty level by setting how the questions are displayed and interacted with in the game. You can also set a game timer to help learners stop playing and transition to new activities.
In this example I chose a CVC Words List and the Build a Monster game.
At the top of the Game Settings page you will see the questions or word list that you have chosen to play in the game. You can remove specific questions or words from the game to tailor it to your students’ exact needs. Click on the Words Selected section and it will expand to show you all of the words. If the word list has more than one category, then click on a category to expand it. To remove a word, simply click on it and it will turn grey showing you that this word is no longer included. Click on it again to add it back in. You can use the Select All or Select None options in the top right corner of the categories if needed.
Now that you have decided which words or questions to include, you can further customize the game by adjusting the rest of the available settings or you can just leave the defaults.
At this point you can either play the game with a student, group or your whole class, or save these settings so that you can play the game at a later time without having to set it up. Saving a game also allows you to assign the game to students so that they can play independently in class or at home.
This next section of the tutorial will dive deep into the most common game settings that are available in most games.
Game Stetting: Play without questions
This setting is available in many of our games but not all. If it appears on the Game Settings page, then you will be able to play the game without questions by clicking the setting checkbox.
You will still first need to pick a question set or word list in order to get to the game, but once on the Game Settings page, you can select this setting and turn questions off.
Turning questions off will allow you to ask questions orally or it will let the student simply play with the game.
Game Setting: Maximum number of possible answers
This settings allows you to control how questions are displayed to the student. You can make the questions easier by selecting to show only 2 possible answers for example. If you want your student to answer verbally, you can choose to show only a check mark and/or an X rather than possible answers.
Below are some examples of how a question would appear using 4, 3 and 2 possible answers as well as the check mark and X.
Game Setting: Make questions self correcting
This setting is active by default. You can turn it off by unchecking the box. When a student answers incorrectly, the question will remain on the screen until the correct answer is chosen. There is a short delay before a student can choose another answer so this stops them from rapidly clicking every answer and will hopefully encourage them to take the time to try to understand the question.
Game Setting: Show the correct answer after an incorrect answer is chosen
This setting is not active by default. If you turn it on by checking the box, when a student answers a question incorrectly, the correct answer will be highlighted in green and then the question will disappear. The student will need to answer another question correctly before the game will move forward.
Game Setting: Show audio buttons
This setting is active by default and it enables the "say the word" feature. The ”say the word” feature in games happens automatically when an English word in a word list or multiple choice answer matches a word that we have in our audio library. This feature does not work for sentences or multiple words. For a detailed description of how this feature works and to see a list of all of the words in our audio library, please read the article How does the say the word feature work?.
Game Setting: Label answers with A, B, C, D
This setting is not active by default. If you turn it on by checking the box, then all answers in a question will have a small yellow alphabetic label in the top left. This setting is useful if you are playing whole class and you have given your students cards for A, B, C and D. When a question appears on screen, students can hold up the card that corresponds with the answer they chose and then you can easily see who is correct and incorrect.
Game Setting: Question format when a word list has been chosen
Many of the games will format a word list into multiple choice questions. In the game settings you can choose what content you want in the question and answers. By default, the format for the question will be text and the format for the answers will be pictures. The image below shows all of the possible combinations.
