Last May, Jesse Sanderson took some time to do the things he never had.
He’s a second-year master's student in the Department of Media and Information. His degree will focus on user experience. However, earlier this year, Sanderson decided to expand his studies by pursuing a Serious Games Graduate Certificate.
And that’s how he ended up taking an educational trip to Africa.
“I went to Tanzania as part of a study abroad program called ‘Designing Technology Solutions for Schools in Africa,’” Sanderson said. “A big focus was teaching students and teachers how to use programs such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Each of us also got to do our own individual project.”
In primary school – what Americans would call elementary or grade school – students in Tanzania learn a little English. But as they advance, as Sanderson learned, students face a jarring transition.
“Many students will drop out of high school after their first year because they're used to receiving classroom instruction in Swahili during primary school, and then it shifts exclusively to English in secondary school,” he said. “So, a lot of students will face challenges with that.”
Sanderson created a game to help build those vital language skills. It’s called “We Speak Kiingereza,” the Swahili word for “English.” The game is designed for two to six players. Similar to classic games like “Monopoly,” players roll dice and advance along the board, stopping at 10 different “checkpoints.” Each checkpoint requires the player to draw one card from either the “easy” or the “hard” deck. The cards include a sentence the player must translate from Swahili to English. The player must say the English translation out loud. A teacher determines whether the translation is correct.
Sanderson says an English teacher wrote about 25 percent of the sentences in the game, in accordance with Tanzanian high school English curriculum. The rest were written by Sanderson himself, with the help of a friend who served as a translator.
By design, “We Speak Kiingereza” goes beyond basic vocabulary words.
“A lot of the traditional instruction in English involves students just learning the material, memorizing it so they can get the right answers on the test, but not really understanding the deeper meaning. So, this game is intended to boost those conversational skills a bit, hopefully to get beyond just basic memorization.”
Sanderson originally designed the game to be played online. But Africa had other plans. Once on the ground, technical difficulties forced him to go old school.
“The Wi-Fi connection was not good enough for me to make the online version,” Sanderson said. “So, I had to kind of scramble a little bit to make an analog version instead. I worked with some local craftsmen to make a frame for the board, and dice by hand. Then we did a lot of printing and cutting out and pasting and everything. I ended up creating an online version of the game when I got home to promote computer use among the students.”
“We Speak Kiingereza” is already getting good reviews. Sanderson says one of the teachers from his initial play session sent him a message after he returned to the U.S. to say he’d begun to share the game with a larger group of students. In August, Sanderson attended the Serious Play Conference in Toronto. There, he met a fellow gamer who’s working on a similar language project in Kenya aimed at younger children aged two to seven. Sanderson says they spoke of the possibility of sharing his game with even more students. He’s also exploring how to apply the game to a different combination of languages.
For now, Jesse Sanderson has no firm plans to market “We Speak Kiingereza” commercially. But he’s not ruling out the notion of it becoming a career launch pad.
“It’s a great feeling to have,” Sanderson said. “It’s definitely something I’d like to focus on in my career, making impactful projects like this.”
By: Kevin Lavery