Short Report: Motivation

After reviewing the video by Dr. Wang and articles including the sic C’s of motivation (choice, challenge, control, collaboration, constructing meaning, and consequences) the educational game that I chose to discuss is Word Frog. Word Frog is a fifth grade interactive educational game that provides practice in matching antonyms, synonyms, and homonyms. The target word appears on the frog, wit the word category underneath, defining the relationship to be matched. Students must match the center word with the correct word on the incoming flies by firing the frog’s tongue at the correct fly. Students must use the arrow keys to more their frog. In order to strike a word, students must press the SPACEBAR or clock the word with the MOUSE. At the begging of the game, students must select the content type (antonyms, synonyms, or homonyms) and select their game speed (slow, normal, or fast). After the round, students are shown their missed question and the correct answers. Students are also given an accuracy percentage and rate per minute.

        

        

The six C’s of motivation have the potential to enhance students’ motivation when applied to open-ended tasks. The six C’s are developed in this interactive game as follows. According to Malone and Lepper, providing explicit choices among alternatives can enhance intrinsic motivation. In this game, the students have the choice of what content they want to play and the game speed. Picking the content gives the student a chance to play something that interests them and picking a game speed flows into the second C, challenge. If the teacher instructs the students’ that they have to play the game at each game speed, the student is challenged t operate a task beyond their skill level. The fact that the students’ are in charge of their game play and level, they are in control of the game. Being that in is a fifth grade level game; students are regulated to their learning level. If these games are to be done in groups or in pairs of two, this can become a collaborative group game. In the classroom, a topic of study might be acronyms, synonyms, and homonyms, so by playing this game students are learning the meaning and why they are important. This game could lead to a writing assignment where they have to use synonyms in their text. At the end of the game, students have to choice to print their scores and details of the game. This could be an example where consequences will be placed and the students can print and show their scores.