Late last month, I did an interview with Agatha Cheng and Daniel Kwan. It was for their podcast, Asians Represent! over at One Shot Podcast. The episode was released a couple of weeks ago. In the show, I talk about the benefits of using tabletop RPGs to teach students English […]
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Students Comparing and Contrasting
For this entire week I had to teach the students compare and contrast essay. Additionally, the theme for the week was “Social Issues”. How should I get them to understand the structure of the essay and the framing for each body paragraph? Firstly, I got each class to list out […]
Continue readingDnD: An Assessment of an Island Economy
Dungeons and Dragons in Class I ran Dungeons and Dragons for the first time… in a classroom. On Wednesday, I found that there was time to run a role-playing game session for the class while giving them a focused objective language wise. So I bought my D&D books. This class […]
Continue readingCombat Missions Game
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, […]
Continue readingFirst 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 […]
Continue readingLast 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 […]
Continue readingGaming 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 […]
Continue readingSWD6: 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 […]
Continue readingMeanwhile, 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. […]
Continue readingMini 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 […]
Continue readingA 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 […]
Continue readingFirst 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 […]
Continue readingPhotos 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.
Continue readingPhotos 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 […]
Continue readingMini Six: The Vanishing at Kuala Perlis
Plans are underway at work to create a tabletop RPG actual play video web series to be posted online. Initiated and managed by Bazli, it would be our push to promote role-playing games (RPGs) as language learning tools that would not only be holistic and comprehensive, but fun and immersive […]
Continue readingCrafting 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 […]
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