Roll the dice, draw a card, and correct the mispelling misspelling – in Grade 7 English, students are designing and creating board games aimed at helping players improve their grammar skills. 

Inspired by a Grade 7 science project where students created board games to teach users about the solar system, Middle School English Teacher Quintus Cunningham instructed boys to design a fun and engaging activity that addressed the most common errors in undergraduate writing, as identified by Stanford University. 

“In Form I English, most grammar practice typically comes from textbook exercises, so the hope for this project was to give students a chance to play with grammar and enjoy the process,” he said.   

“It helps the skills stay fresher in your mind because you’re not just writing it out,” Max L. ’30 explained. “You’re actually engaged in the questions you have.” 

The students tackled errors like run-on sentences, verb tense shift, and confused pronoun usage. 

Samir T. ’30 and his partner focused on wrong word errors, like using “compose” instead of “comprise” or “illusion” rather than “allusion.”  

“We created a question book, and then you had to choose the right word to put in the blank that would work in the sentence,” Samir said. “It helped us learn about how even though words sound the same, there can be a different meaning." 

Cunningham was impressed by the variety of the games.  

"I was particularly blown away by their creative game designs,” he said. “I expected the games to be fairly similar, but the students surprised me with a wide variety of games, each featuring unique mechanics and challenges.” 

Students played and evaluated each other's games, giving them a chance to learn from their classmates' creations as well as their own.  

"Creating a game with a partner and friend was a more engaging way to learn than a lecture,” Samir added. “We even used mistakes that we make ourselves and implemented those into the game, so I think it’ll help us not make those mistakes again."