Irish Language Hunting Weekend, T minus 13 days...plus news

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Willem Larsen

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Feb 15, 2014, 6:55:10 PM2/15/14
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Hello All,

We're gearing up for our Portland, OR, Winter Language Hunting weekend, and our current project is growing an Irish language speech community here in the Pacific Northwest. If you don't know about it and would like to come, I encourage you to sign up ASAP - we road-test all our new game developments at our events and line up the next ones to tackle once the event is over. Get more or info and register here:


By steadily working with and focusing on Irish and quarterly events we've been slowly improving the language hunting game system - finding new problems, solving them, moving on to the next problem, addressing it, etc.

At this time the game is like a spiral of DNA - with different rounds, levels, and goals. It's still pretty simple though.

Novices sit down and play through a tea conversation. In bite-sized pieces they hit the situation on the table with all 8 questions, putting each Question-based bite-size piece through a Repetition Round and a Free Play Round before moving to the next Question. They start only focus on "I/You", then once they've completed a turn around the game board the up it to "I/You/He/She", then once they've completed a turn around the board they add in "Us/You All/They". Then they do the same thing, but in the past tense! Depending on the language we may alternate like this: "I/You" Present, "I/You" Past, etc. These are represented by icon cards in the center of the board.

Once the Novices have finished that they're ready to tackle Intermediate play. Intermediates do the same thing as Novices did, but start nipping away at 10 topics, which become the new Center Cards. Meaning, 8 questions directed at a Clothing conversation, then 8 questions directed at a Home conversation, then 8 questions directed at a Hygiene/Body conversation, etc.

We've never had anyone make it all the way through Intermediate play and be ready for Advanced, so I'll hold off on what we have designed for that (since we've never been able to play-test it!).

But I hope this gives you an idea of how refined play is getting. I'm pretty excited - I feel like we've finally developed a clear road-map that really can take an emerging language community deep into a language, in a safe and flow-based way.

Thrilling!

yrs,
Willem







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