Multiplayer Worms Snake HomeRow

When it comes to teaching kids typing skills, teacher educators these days will often turn to a concept that's become very prevalent in today's classroom: the idea of gamification. What this is is basically taking things that kids would ordinarily learn through reading in teacher-approved materials either in textbooks or online, or even trying this on their own, and instead presenting the material in the form of a game that the children must play in order to fully learn the material. While some might lament the increasing amount of time that kids these days will spend playing online games, some teacher educators have instead taken the position that we should take advantage of this phenomenon and bring it into the classroom. In times past this was seen in such educational games as Oregon Trail, but as technology and tastes in gaming are changing, so too are the opportunities for integrated gamification in the classroom.

A Clever, Gamified Way of Engaging Students while Teaching them Typing Skills

This game operates in a similar way to the standard game of Snake that you might've played before on an old Nokia handset. What sets this particular incarnation of the popular game apart, however, is the way that it alternates which keys are used to maneuver your snake protagonist in his quest to gobble up all the fruit in sight. Instead of using the same four arrow keys to move your player character, as was commonly done in the past, the keys in this version will constantly shift, so on one keystroke, the letter T might move you up while the letter V will move you down, and then those keys can be shifted once you press one of the corresponding keys, and suddenly you'll need to press, for instance, the letter R to move up, and the letter B to move down.

Tips and Tricks

One of the best ways that students can take advantage of the game's format and excel at it is to memorize where all of the keys are on their keyboard. Indeed, in a clever way that's exactly what the game is doing, as switching between looking at the screen and then the keyboard and back again becomes increasingly difficult to do the closer your snake gets to gobbling up the prize and so bringing you to the next level. While this will be difficult at firs,t in time the student will get used to pressing the keys without looking at the keyboard, and then as well as winning the game, they'll become skilled at typing without having to look down at the keyboard. What makes this game especially great is its universality. The teacher educator can appreciate the way the game is played as much as the student.