Hello all, many of my students really enjoy Nintendo media so I spent some time making a directions-based activity with Zelda characters that I use in the classroom. It has been received very positively by my students so I felt like I should share it. Hopefully others can find a use for it.
In the Classroom
I have used this primarily as a review of the phrases "Turn Left," "Turn Right," and "Go Straight" with my 4th grade elementary school students, but I have also had success with 5th graders as a review of the previous year.
After doing a quick review of the target phrases, I start up the first level and give students the simple instructions along the lines of "Where do I go?" or "Please tell me where to go," enforcing that it needs to be in English if they start answering in Japanese. I haven't had the need to say more than that, honestly. I usually go down all the students in order and ask them to give me an answer, rather than taking hands or letting them yell out the answer as I feel like that lets me keep better control of the classroom, but your mileage may vary.
There is no set path that happens in the PowerPoint. You can make Link go in circles and walk into walls if you really want. Because of that, I encourage students to make mistakes and commit to them. They accidentally said "left" instead of "right"? That's fine, he's now facing the wrong way. It usually gets a laugh from the classroom and the next student can correct. The activity is long enough where the same student should have several opportunities to give an answer and correct themself, so I don't try to force a specific answer out of them (unless they are clearly unable to answer) and allow them to learn through mistakes.
I've only ever tried this activity in smaller to medium sized classrooms (between 3-15 kids), so I can't really advise on how it will look with a larger set of students.
How to Use
The PowerPoint is broken down into several parts. An opening menu and three separate stages that can be traversed.
1. The menu is fairly self-explanatory. You can choose to start from the beginning (Which will also provide basic student instructions of the target language), or you can choose to start from a specific stage if you are continuing from a previous lesson.
2. The stages should be fairly intuitive, but I could be wrong.
- Basically, use the directional arrows in the bottom-right corner of the screen to maneuver Link around the maze. If they are grayed out at any point then there is probably an animation playing, so don't try to force anything.
- When moving to another room, a green arrow will appear after Link leaved the screen, click on this arrow to progress to the appropriate room.
3. You should never need to press anything while transitioning between two stages/levels. The slides should progress on there own after a few seconds.
Walkthrough
- Level 1. Simple introductory level that consists of only 3 rooms. Get the key and use it to open the door, moving on to stage 2.
- Level 2. Similar to level 1, but a little more expansive. First, you need to get the sword. Then, use the sword to fight through the enemies and get the key. Lastly, use the key on the big door in the second room you encounter.
- Level 3. This is played like a fight. You need to hit the knight in the back 3 times, and he turns to face you after each attack. After the third attack, you defeat the knight and the game ends. You win!
Help, My Character is Stuck
I think I've all the situations where it's impossible to progress to the next room before posting, but it's always possible I may have missed something. In this situation, I recommend simply using the arrow keys on your keyboard to manually change slides until you are in a room that seems to make sense. I apologize in advance if you run into this!
Please let me know if you run into any major issues while going through the activity, and I'll do my best to address them.
Other than that, I hope you enjoy this activity!
Wow great game. Thanks for sharing.
The amount of work that must have went into this is bananas! Really excited to try this with my classes!
Not sure if I'll have time to use this with my class but this is seriously amazing!