We have visitors this week. The language educators from Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University, Thailand are on a three-day working visit of Universiti Malaysia Perlis. There are a number of activities that the Centre for International Languages scheduled from them. One of the activities is a tabletop role-playing game session. I was given a table to set up books, dice, maps and paper miniatures for a mini-exhibition. Before me, my colleague Yuzy (who plays the teenage spy Jijah in our The Laundry (Malaysia) RPG campaign) ran an ice-breaking session and demonstrated how online learning tools like Quizziz and Kahoot were run in class. After Yuzy’s activities were done, I began my segment with a short slide presentation. The presentation summarised what a tabletop role-playing game is, what games exist in the market and how it could benefit language learning, especially in an ESL environment. Not to mention how it could improve […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: February 2019
Marching Orders for Irfan
This might be Irfan’s final year at Semsira, his secondary school, and mine as the vice president of the PIBG (Parents Teachers Association). I was invited to attend the school’s Sports Day and I took some time to head there before a class. I was invited to sit up on in the gazebo with other members of the executive committee. Later, I even bestowed medals to winners of some events. The parade marched by and Irfan was with his scout group at the back of the column. Ain moved closer to snap a photo. The effects of dry season is apparent from the brown grass on the school field. There were five Sports Houses in his school, namely Bendahara, Laksamana, Temenggung, Penghulu Bendahari and Syahbandar. Each were named after titles in historic administrative titles of the region. Addendum (March 9): During an annual general meeting, the PIBG was dissolved and […]
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Tasik Timah Tasoh Shines
As I was heading home from classes with Ain, we stopped by the lake. We though that the sun descending behind the hills reflected on the water would look superb. We were wrong. It was not superb at all. It was spectacular.
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It’s Still Chinese New Year Season
I guess everyone is still on vacation this week.
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Posthuman Pals
POSTHUMAN PALS RPG IDEA This article was first written and published on my Google Plus account on Jan 27, 2012. Once upon a time, humans flourished on this planet Earth. They found newer and faster ways of doing things and moving information around. They developed not only computers, but computers that could think, speak, communicate and observe like a human. They developed ways of duplicating an individual human’s memories and thought patterns and transfer them into machines, as well as transferring artificial intelligence entities into cloned human bodies. For many centuries, humans and machines lived together peacefully. Then one day, for some now-forgotten reason, humans and machines began to believe themselves superior to the other and a war broke out, beginning with the deaths of organic minds in machine bodies and machine minds in organic bodies. Then they started tossing nukes at each other. Billions died every night. Some servers […]
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To Sitiawan and then Home
And so it came to pass that our vacation came to an end. But before that, we had to depart from Nia’s house. There was a flurry of furtive but sad goodbyes. We headed north towards Sitiawan using the old road we used to travel from KL. I thought I would try using the back roads via Kampung Kuantan. Ultimately we stopped at Sabak Bernam for lunch. Ain drove the rest of the way to Sitiawan. That night Atok and Opah treated us to dinner. The next day we went to Lumut. There might have been a fatal accident at the Lumut junction near the local Shell station. The next morning, we had breakfast at the Padang Astaka of Sitiawan before we geared up and headed home. We bade Atok and Opah farewell and hoped they would come visit us soon. We arrived in Beseri just in time for the […]
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A Gamification Workshop
On this fine Saturday morning, we drove to Taman Tun to the NeoOne Centre for Accelerated Learning. I had previously booked a spot in a workshop entitled “Facilitating Change via Gamification“. The workshop was organised by the Malaysian Association of Facilitators. The event focused to introducing gamification to the various industries in the professional world and I had the opportunity to describe my work in the field of education. Besides that, we played a number of board games, namely Blokus and Decrypto. By learning the rules, the participants were able to express how the game, and the process of gamification, would be able to help in their own fields of work. Perhaps someday I would be able to cooperate with this group of facilitators to further introduce role-playing games as training tools.
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More of Melaka
After the zoo exploration, we left our fate in the hands of Ayah Cik Farid and family as we journeyed to further nooks and crannies of the state of Melaka. We had lunch and stopped for zohor prayers. Then, our next stop was the Submarine Museum at Klebang Beach where the Ouessant, formerly of the French navy, resided. It was our first experience in a submarine even if it was a decommissioned one. Ain tried to shower in the sub’s head. Meanwhile, there were also a pair of old military fighters parked as exhibits at the museum, an A-4 Skyhawk and an F-5E Tiger II. Irfan and Nia inspected the fighter’s undercarriage closely. Later, we headed to the tourist district of Melaka town. By this time, our cash and phone batteries were running low. I hope we are able to visit the Flora de la Mar Maritime Museum next time […]
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Zoological Exploration of Melaka
Today is not only my birthday, but it is also Federal Territory day. Kuala Lumpur day. Ayah Cik Farid and Cik Ma both work in Cyberjaya, so they both got the day off. They invited us for a drive to Melaka. Since they live in the south of the Klang Valley, Melaka is just a hop skip away via the highway. First, we went to the Melaka Zoo. The zoo impressed me because at some points it seems like we were really in an equatorial jungle surrounded by real foliage. There were areas that were landscaped, but a lot of the exhibits were designed around what seemed to be old jungle terrain. Although it was our first time there, Nia’s family had been there before, so they took us around the zoo on foot. We opted not to take the motorised tour because we would not have the opportunity to […]
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