During semester break week, I was assigned to the team that would be teaching a class for a contingent from the Royal Malaysian Army. For my “role play” segment of three hours, I decided to design a card game that doubles as a rudimentary roleplaying game (RPG). Two nights before, I spent up till 0200 hours designing the mechanics and physically producing the prototype cards by hand. There were 7 decks consisting of the Mission Objective deck, Insertion Method deck, Terrain deck, Weather deck, Obstacle deck, Setback deck and Enemy Contact deck. The Mission Objective deck has a target number of between 9 to 11. Each of the other decks has a modifier number anywhere between -3 to +3 depending on the situation on the card. To accomplish the mission on the Objective Deck the player has to roll a twenty-sided dice (d20) equalling or below the target number given. […]
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I’m clearly in red
Herein lies the collection of blog posts about my teaching English as a second language to university students.
First Week of Social Social in Class
The first week of the first session of the 2018/2019 academic session has begun. Do the students possess the not-very-instinctive ability to position words in an adjective phrases — specifically the positions of the noun and the adjective? I would like to happily report that this semester, the students have this ability… mostly… as these Kahoot quiz results show among six separate classes: At least no one answered “social social” or “media media”.
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Last Exam of the Semester
It is the last final exam I have to invigilate in; the last activity with students I have this semester. I will miss this batch of students. Although none of the exams tonight were English language course papers, there were a number of my English students for the semester taking them. Somehow, exam invigilation feels like a blast with these guys around although I myself am feeling under the weather what with the coughing and all.
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Gaming at the Geomatics Carnival 2018
Today, the Centre for International Languages was officially invited by Zainee to UiTM Arau nearby for their Geomatics Carnival 2018 exhibition. There was a hobbies exhibition section where I set up shop with tabletop RPGs with my colleague Bazli. I would talk to visitors about using RPGs as a language learning tool. Also, to run games if and when I can. Sharnizan of Serious Games UUM was also present to introduce and sell his product the Ace of Maths game to UiTM students. Though at this point he was explaining the card game to Bazli. There was no dearth of visitors to our tables when the exhibition started. The exhibition organisers even provided Bazli and I with a packed lunch. My usual suspects line up was arrayed for display at their table, eliciting enquiries once in a while. I ran two game sessions for visitors. I ran the Edge of […]
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Multicultural Night
With Ain away at Pasir Mas to take care of some things there, it was just Irfan and I at home for the weekend. After spending most of the weekend binging on The Terror, an excellent show by the way, we would have nothing else to do until the weekday rebooted itself. Thankfully, I had bought a couple of tickets for the Multicultural Night 2018 at the university great hall. After dark, we both drove there not just to check out the event, but also to hunt for dinner. What awaited us there was something that blew me away. Here are some Twitter posts, videos included. It’s the university’s Multicultural Night 2018. pic.twitter.com/zpzSGIsByq — Khairul Hisham (@hishgraphics) April 29, 2018 Who choreographed these students? It’s pretty awesome. pic.twitter.com/95oIn0uJI8 — Khairul Hisham (@hishgraphics) April 29, 2018 The Somalians have the stage! pic.twitter.com/LgpcbmyJlp — Khairul Hisham (@hishgraphics) April 29, 2018 The Indians […]
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SWD6: A Hot Day in Mos Espa
I brought West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game 2nd edition Revised and Expanded with me to class on Monday. There was time for me to run an hour of Star Wars RPG for my students, so I mustered together all the ones who would speak and ones who would take notes on behalf of their characters, which meant two students per player characters. The students used the pregenerated characters I made for last semester‘s gaming session in class but they named their own characters themselves. Star Wars D6 A Hot Day in Mos Espa Dramatis Personae (Pregens): Creed Kenobi – Failed Jedi Dini – Kid, Creed’s apprentice The Mighty Jedibo – Bounty hunter Wakanda – Outlaw Uvuevuevuenoenoonosac a.k.a. “Osas” – Rodian saboteur Two suns shine down upon the planet Tatooine. A Rebel team landed their modified YT-1300 freighter at a landing bay in the city of Mos Espa […]
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Meanwhile, During the Rest of SILK 2018
The Symposium of International Languages and Knowledge was quite the event. Besides running the RPG workshop, I also sat in other talks, participated in other educational workshops and also had lots of food. Here are some photos to show the experience I underwent at Walailak University, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand. WU was holding their 26th anniversary expo on campus, a big event we were told. SILK was scheduled to be held at the end of March in conjunction with their anniversary. We waited at the border for their transport to pick us up. It took four hours for the two transports to deposit us at a hotel near their campus. That evening, a bunch of us went out to the expo site at the university in search of dinner. The expo site was big, along a single road on campus. There were vendors who sold food, flowers, furniture, agricultural gear […]
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Mini Six: Whiteout, or an RPG Workshop at SILK 2018
This weekend I was honoured to be able to run a tabletop RPG workshop during the 2018 Symposium for International Languages and Knowledge which was held at Walailak University at Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand. Last year, SILK 2017 was held here in Perlis and was featured on the blog as well. Here are some photos of the event with an actual play report of the game that I ran for the Thai students. The little abstract for the workshop which I submitted a couple of months earlier appeared in the programme book for the symposium. Parallel talk session were underway when I went to scout the room where I was due to run the workshop. I quickly set up the table and then did some last minute game prep for the coming participants. Besides showing off the diversity of RPG systems, these book covers displayed side-by-side on the table can […]
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A VCX-100 in Class for Some Reason
A VCX-100 model transport made an appearance in class during lessons today. I used Kahoot for a live online exercise with my classes this week. The exercise covered Transition words. What better imagery can I use for Transitions other than hyperspace corridor scenes. Believe it or not by 2005 and after 6 major Star Wars motion picture releases, we were only shown two scenes of ships traveling though hyperspace. There were not one scene of it in the Prequel Trilogy. Thanks to The Clone Wars and Rebels we now have dozens of hyperspace corridor shots. Finally, the answer to the quiz above is “but”.
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First Class of the New Semester
The second semester for the 2017/2018 academic year has begun! And here are photos from the first class of the semester. Wait what? What are the students doing fiddling about on their phone, you ask? Why are they not listening to me in class? Well, it’s because they were… …signing into Kahoot to do the quiz I had set up for them. The full question is, “Oh my God! Amir and Sathya ______ finally arrived!” For skimming and scanning exercises, I asked the students to identify the general location of the events on the page displayed above. Then I asked them to identify the weapons mentioned therein. Thankfully the students were not affected by the protomolecule.
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Photos from an Academic Workshop
Once upon a time, the entire department was invited to attend an academic excellence workshop in which it was hoped that we would all be much more excellent than we were at being academics. Here are some photos from the programme. Perhaps some mouseover text will be provided as well.
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Photos from a Keynote Address
The university’s vice chancellor was slated to hold his annual keynote address before the entire staff, and I was given a new task some weeks earlier. I visited the site a day earlier to help prepare the multimedia guys to run an online Kahoot quiz for the audience. I handed over my set of questions to them and ceded the table. I hoped that they would use at least one of my questions. The next day, everyone assembled at the main hall. I sat with a coterie of departmental colleagues. Ultimately I discovered that they only used three questions for the quiz session and one of them was mine! It made the effort worth it. I suppose we would assemble again at the hall next year!
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Crafting a Brochure Once More
It has been decades since I made an actual three-fold brochure for real. The workplace needed one for an upcoming postgraduate programme they would be running. Using Inkscape (and actually running around the office building to take fresh photographs) I managed to hammer a design out. The photos above are of the mock-up I printed out. These brochures would be first brought to Bangladesh for an event there.
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A Feast Concludes the Year
The Welfare Club of the workplace organised a little feast for CIL’s staff members. It was also a pot luck so Ain made her fusilli pasta goreng tom yam to add to the table. It was also a Friday morning, so we all recited surah al-Kahfi. There was even a birthday cake to celebrate those born in December. All in all it was a fun morning at work. Photos of the day follows:
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On The Airwaves
One of my students Clement is not only running his own radio show at the university, but he has also experience in the radio broadcast industry. He had been asking me to be a guest om his show. So there I was talking about English learning and role-playing games with students on an actual radio show. Another one of those things I never thought I would be doing three years ago when I first joined the university as a translator. Besides Clement, the other students co-hosting the show were Indhu and Jolene under the supervision of Mr. Fadli, who also took the photos below. Clement has plans to expand next semester. Watch this space for more updates.
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Students Take Centre Stage
Narrator: Previously on Hishgraphics Blog… Yesterday, my theatre arts students completed their course. In conjunction with the final session, the students and I organised the inaugural Performance Day for the course. We began at 2pm. Ain brought snacks and kuih for the students. Irfan was our videographer, using the department’s camera. The students had prepared for two plays to be performed for the event. The first was “The Midnight Class” where a pair of students find themselves in a replacement Mandarin language class late at night. However, they soon realise that they are the only two students in the class who are… not dead. “The Midnight Class” had a total of 10 speaking roles. The roles were based on the character building exercise we had over the duration of the course. Some lines made the audience chuckle, especially the punchline to the “Why do they call you Jenny?” line. Even […]
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