Student as a Tutorial Designer

Teach Your Monster to Read can be used for students to “teach” another person, or in this case, a monster to learn how to read. By using the app and exploring different games available to work on certain concepts such as letter-sounds, letter identification, and feeling the accomplishment of their monster leveling up to more advanced levels, students can be inspired to show their work and success in reading concepts!

I would supplement reading concepts with the online app games and also translate some activities to physical games they can show and “play” with their peers. For example, in the Village game, the monster icon travels from one space to another to explore letter-sound correspondences within a certain theme.



In the example below, the student clicked on the rocket icon within the “village” and their monster has flown up to space to build their phonemic awareness and match the letter-sound correspondences. After the student is able to guide the monster to navigate through the space to correctly match the sounds with the letters, the monster would be able to return to the village and continue to click on different icons and then enter different themed environments to continue to work on similar reading concepts.






Students would choose an activity that they experience on the website to translate to be "shown and played" with vowel/letter combination cards, changing the perspective of teaching the monster to complete a task to the student themselves being in the environment and completing the task themselves. By playing the games and different tasks on the website, students will build confidence in their reading concept skills. They will also be inspired in terms of their creativity in a "Show and Play" lesson plan where they would be re-/creating a physical game to show their own individual mastery and understanding of the skill and showcasing those skills as well as teaching their peers!

Some of the difficulties that may come up can be caused by the lack of understanding in the direction of the game itself and since the student would not have complete understanding of the task itself, the uncertainty that would carry over when the student is trying to demonstrate how to successfully complete the task in their "Show and Play" game.

The biggest difficulty and flaw in the app is the accent in instructional language and the differences in certain letter sounds because the game was developed in London. For example, /ar/ in American English has the distinct /r/ sound at the end of the letter combination, but in British English /ar/ sounds more like simply a softer version of the short vowel /a/. The concept of using missions and tasks as a way to engage students in fun learning can be outweighed by the language difference in the app. However, the games can most definitely be used and adapted into physical reading concept games within a classroom!

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