33 Puzzle-Exploring
David Lott
Learning Objectives
Using their newfound knowledge about online vocabulary resources and about solving and creating word puzzles, students venture outside the classroom together to Planet Word (a free D.C. Museum about language) to learn about higher-level word puzzles and how to solve and create them.
Purpose/Rationale
Instructions
First, students will hear from museum staff about the relationships between word-puzzle solving and language learning. Engaging with a real-world puzzling space at the museum (“Lexicon Lane”) and interacting with staff there provide students with an experiential opportunity that goes well beyond the limits of small-scale classroom gaming. Second, students take part in solving the museum’s word puzzles collaboratively, expanding their knowledge of how word puzzles can be designed and how more challenging constructions can feature richer language acquisition opportunities. Third, students discuss how they can take back to campus the idea of a puzzling space like Lexicon Lane and construct their own pop-up puzzling space for an extracurricular puzzle-solving session for fellow ELAP students in the department’s conference room or at the campus library. Similarly, they would discuss how to start a puzzle-solving student club on campus, with the goal of promoting community around entertaining language-learning activities such as the ones they learn about in class and at the museum.
Format Requirements
Similar to #7 and #13 above, each word puzzle at the museum has its own design format that students need to learn at first in order to take part successfully (e.g. the escape-room model in which puzzle-solving means liberating the players from an imaginary lockup of some sort).
Rubric/Criteria
As in #8 and #14 above, each word puzzle engaged with at the museum counts as an in-class exercise, with the in-class exercise category as a whole allotted a portion of the overall final grade as detailed in the syllabus. Also, students will be made aware that the vocabulary they learn at Lexicon Lane will also show up on vocabulary quizzes later on in the semester, so those words will in effect be included as part of the course’s overall quiz grade, also specified as an assignment category in the syllabus.
