Chants Of Sennaar: A Video Game Illustrating The Need For CI

When I first started playing Chants of Sennaar on Steam, I said “uh oh,” thinking it would be a game that suggested language learning was all about immersion and guessing. Luckily, I was wrong.

“Legend says that one day, a traveler will reunite the Peoples of the Tower who are unable to communicate with each other. Observe, listen, and decipher ancient languages in a fascinating universe inspired by the myth of Babel.”

The basic gameplay is you moving about the world and clicking on things to interact with, like puzzles, or other humanoids, as you’re shown glyphs. The point is to learn the glyphs and progress throughout the narrative. While the game certainly has an inductive element to learning those glyphs, you eventually get what you need: comprehension. And it’s full comprehension, too, not just that “gist” stuff that only gets you so far. The game gives you comprehended input.

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Content To Pedagogy: The Natural Progression Of [Latin] Teachers

I’ve observed how teachers first start out all about content. This makes sense. Teachers generally really like, or maybe even love their content area. In the classroom, they’re certainly the experts. That doesn’t mean they rival scholars in terms of knowledge, of course, but most college undergrads possess enough content knowledge to teach what they know. You can even obtain a teaching license in some states having never taken an education course, instead passing tests (e.g., Praxis, MTEL, etc.) almost entirely content-based, with just a fraction of items related to teaching. Quite bluntly, the state of education is such that even with some training, many teachers are missing an overlooked aspect of teaching: solid pedagogy…

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