All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy: Triptico to the Rescue

[Source: "The Shining" movie (1980)]

How many times have you heard of the aforementioned proverb? Many of us first came across the expression while watching one of the best movies in the history of cinema, The Shining (1980). Well, who could forget the famous and eerily fascinating scene where Shelley Duvall, who plays the role of Jack Nicholson's wife in the movie, makes a chilling discovery that her writer husband has filled up pages after pages writing 10 words over and over again and those are, "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"!

Never fails to give the chills, right? If you are a teacher by profession, then you most definitely have recognized the underlying significance of this expression many times in your life. "All work" during class time may not always turn learners into dull boys and girls, but it most certainly makes the lesson tedious and monotonous. A little play can surely create a huge difference and get learners happily engaged in the task at hand. Carefully designed tasks on websites like Triptico can make learning fun and prevent learners from labeling classes as "boring".

Triptico to the Rescue!

Triptico is a powerful online tool which can help teachers to build any activity, quiz or fun games. It can also be used to make random groups of students or to nominate random students to answer a question. This website does not only allow teachers to customize their own materials and tasks, but also offers a number of ready-made layouts of activities and quizzes that can help teachers to create their classroom exercises within minutes.

Contents

On the beautiful website of Triptico, there are 11 types of quizzes that are just a click away  in the "Resources" section. However, do not be deceived by the word quiz, because these are not the same old traditional type of quizzes that are unnerving and stressful. Quizzes, such as Bingo, Image Bingo, Word Mix, What's the Question, Connect etc. are short tests in the form of games.

Further, there are other options for teachers, such as "Selector", "Timer" and "Tools" that can assist them in nominating students, forming groups, keeping track of an activity duration and creating many more fun activities. Besides the fun elements, the activities that can be designed on Triptico are very effective to promote learning. Studies suggest that, games can induce more motivation in students than any other activities (Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971).

Layout and Navigation

Triptico has a fairly easy to navigate and colourful layout. It has a few  clearly labelled tabs that help a new user to understand the functions pretty quickly. As I already mentioned, the best thing for a novice user or teacher is that it already has quite a few options given on the website for creating quizzes or making groups or setting up the timer along with sample materials. As a result, it is very easy for a novice user or teacher to understand the strategies of operating it. 

Furthermore, it has short tutorials that pop up on your screen while creating any material for the first time. The tutorials help you to get familiarized with each and every step of creating a material and you can go through the tutorials as many times as you want.

Language, Pictures and Options

Triptico has plenty of pictures that help you to understand how the materials would look like once created. In addition to that, it has very lucid and conversational language that help users to understand everything clearly. Moreover, you will keep receiving messages from the Triptico team who will assure you over and over again that you can get in touch with them in case you have queries. Some materials that other teachers created will also be available to you that you can either use for your class or get an idea from to create your own materials.

Target Users

So who is Triptico for? Triptico is mainly for teachers who can use it to create teaching materials for students of all age groups and levels. It is not only an exciting software that can create fun-filled animated quizzes but it also engages learners through options like 'Selector' and 'Timer' and in turn helps the teacher to save a lot of class time.

How Can English Teachers Use a Website like Triptico?

For language teachers Triptico is not less than a blessing! Language teachers can use Triptico in a variety of ways. Some of these are discussed below.

Vocabulary Games

Triptico quizzes can be used to design vocabulary games which will help students to enhance their knowledge about the names of things and places and learn how to describe them. Teachers can use quizzes like 'Swipe!' and 'Connections' to help students enhance their vocabulary knowledge. Not only that, tools like 'Text Spinner', 'Image Spinner' and 'Task Spinner' are amazing tools to teach vocabulary, describing things and places as well as an effective way of conducting language based multiple choice tests.

Sentence Structures

Some games like 'Bingo', 'Word Magnets' and 'Image Bingo' can help them to learn new words and ways to describe people, cities, animals etc. Quizzes like 'What's the Question?' help learners to formulate questions based on one word which helps them to create sentence structures and experiment with them. There are other tools like ''Slow Writing' and 'Order Sorter' that help students a lot to understand the structures of sentences minutely and learn through experiment. 

Forming Groups and Maintaining Time

The tool 'Selector' helps the teacher to select students for tasks via options like 'Student Selector'. The tool 'Timer' is no boring clock ticking to let the students know that the time is running, rather it has different ways of showing that, such as- 'Hourglass', 'Circle Timer' and 'Block Timer'. This option even makes time slipping away more interesting than anyone could ever imagine!

Here is a quiz that I created on adjectives and adverbs for pre-intermediate/intermediate learners on Triptico. Have a look!

Limitations

There are a few limitations of Triptico, such as:

1. Unlike Kahoot users have to pay to use it beyond the seven-day long trial. 
2. Students' access to personal tech devices and minimum tech literacy are compulsory components to avail Triptico during a lesson. The absence of these might not work in favour of the teacher.
3. Also, besides a projector, a projector screen and a fast internet connection and an interactive smart board are necessary to provide the teacher and students with the best experience of this online resource which might not be possible to arrange in low-resource classrooms.  

Although in a low-resource context this might not be an ideal teaching tool, but at those schools that have appropriate technological and logistic support, this website can turn into teachers' favourite in no time.

Here is an interesting short video on Triptico. Although it does not say much about how to use the website, still it succeeds in giving a brief idea about the online resource.

A little play or a lot of play?

To conclude, it is indeed necessary to make lessons interesting and engaging because studies found that enjoyment does have a positive impact on learning (Wu, Yen & Marek, 2011, p. 126). Nonetheless, it is also important to remember that these game-based teaching materials can be very time-consuming and disrupt other more important and practical classroom activities. 

Game based tasks can be used as ice-breakers, warm-ups and plenaries, however, using too much of these can hamper learning rather than promote it. Teachers need to be careful and keep in mind that "a little play during work" can be useful, but "all play and no work" can devastate the chances of achieving teaching and learning objectives.

References:
1. Avedon, E. M., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1971). The study of games. John Wiley & Sons: Oxford.

2. Wu, W. C. V., Yen, L. L., & Marek, M. (2011). Using online EFL interaction to increase confidence, motivation, and ability. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 14(3), 118-129. Retrived January 24, 2019 from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a24d/7a45702ebea7363bc4de3c0c1fc8af6382e5.pdf