Surely, at some point this year, a student in one of your classes has mentioned the mobile game “Among Us.” It is a social deduction team game where a group of brightly-colored astronauts is hurtling through space, attempting to keep their spaceship intact and complete ship maintenance tasks. Among the crew mates, a couple “imposters” sneak around the ship, sabotaging the work of the crew members and taking them out of the game. The goals of the crew mates are either to identify all the imposters and vote them out of the game during an emergency meeting, or complete all the tasks on the ship. The goals of the imposter(s) are either to irreparably sabotage the ship’s systems, or take out enough of the crew mates such that the imposters have taken over the ship.
I think students love it because it is very fun to debate who saw what, who has actually been completing tasks for the good of the ship, and who is acting “sus” – that’s “suspicious.” I personally love social deduction games (like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, or Mafia), so I totally get it when my students want to talk about their strategies, the tricks they have played on friends and strangers, and their frustrations when no one believes them when they knew the truth all along! It’s intense, and so much fun.
But how can we talk about it during class? Just now, I happened upon a post in the iFLT / NTPRS / CI Teaching Facebook group by a teacher named Christan. They had created a template with vocabulary for talking about the game in Spanish, and another teacher named Christy quickly offered a French translation. I’m here to offer the German one I whipped through real quick!
How might we use these? It sounds to me like a great brain break. Maybe we just want to show the students the vocab so that students can have it for themselves – they LOVE talking about this game. Christan suggested displaying the vocab, and then actually playing a game as a class! (This is possible if you make your own private game room within the game, as far as I know.) Students who have the game will obviously be very involved, but students who are not playing can follow along as the teacher or a chosen student plays, and the teacher can narrate the whole time in the L2. Students could even give input on what the teacher should do, or who to vote for during the emergency meetings, based on what they have seen from the projected game or their classmates’ reactions!
I think we could all use more play generally, and also specifically this year. I think I’m going to try this out, and I’ll try to report back, too, about what worked! For now, check out these chat mats for the very popular mobile game “Among Us:”