Board game to boost language learning
Zekeriya Kazanci's main motivation is to facilitate language learning. His concept for a board game aimed at making Turkish learning more accessible is being further developed with the support of UU Innovation. Photo: Sara Gredemark.
Zekeriya Kazanci, who teaches Turkish at Uppsala University, found inspiration for a new board game from the grammar challenges his students faced. Having trialed the game in university Turkish as a foreign language courses and in Turkish mother tongue instruction in primary school, he is soon poised to enter the market.
The details of the board game still need to be kept secret, but Zekeriya Kazanci says it is all about getting from start to finish by making correct sentences in Turkish. The key is to add the right endings to each verb to provide subject and tense agreement. This is a particularly difficult nut to crack for Turkish language students, according to Kazanci.
"Turkish is a popular language to learn here. At the beginning of the autumn term, we had 165 students, but then we started to lose some of them as we went through the course due to various reasons, including unusual grammar structure," says Kazanci and continues:
"When I saw the challenges, I always thought of an easier or more fun way to learn the most difficult areas of Turkish grammar. That is how I came up with this idea of a board game.”
Turkish is his native language, and he has worked as an English teacher in Turkey. Holding both a master's degree in Computer Education and Instructional Technology, as well as a PhD in English Language Teaching, Kazanci emphasises the importance of activating as many senses as possible in learning.
"I thought this board game has to be tangible so you can see it, feel the letters and hear the sentences. So I try to add as many senses as possible.”
Test, refine and test again
After months of testing and refining the game, Kazanci now has a final version. He has involved his own students and colleagues, as well as primary school teachers and students in mother tongue education classes, to customise the game.
He is heartened by positive student feedback and supported by colleagues who see the game's teaching value.
“Finally, I have finished the experimental part. I am really happy about this. I have got enough results and feedback to move on.”
Zekeriya Kazanci's focus is now on finding suitable manufacturers for the game, while there are also many other issues to resolve, not least around design protection, copyright and business development. In all this, he has the support of UU Innovation.
A happy coincidence
Zekeriya Kazanci learnt about UU Innovation at a conference on pedagogy. There he met someone who had developed a board game for a completely different subject, and on closer inspection of the board he saw the copyright symbol and the author's name. This piqued Kazanci's curiosity, and when he asked how this was done, he was told to "email UU Innovation and find out".
“When I first came to UU Innovation, I was not confident about my idea. Does it have a chance to be in the market? I also did not know what to do, how to develop this. But now I have people holding flashlights for me and showing me where to go. This guidance has helped me a lot," says Kazanci.
He wants to emphasise the appeal of developing ideas and the importance of knowing what you like to do.
"I have found that I enjoy this process very much. That's why the outcome can sometimes be a bit irrelevant. In the end, what matters most to me is being a successful educator who helps people learn languages.”
Can your game be adapted to teach languages other than Turkish?
“With quite small adjustments to the game's elements, it is possible to apply to any language but it requires co-operation with a competent teacher of that language. I really want to work with a Swedish teacher to produce and adapt my game for Swedish. Since I live in Sweden now, I am also trying to learn Swedish, and I know what challenges that brings.”
Sara Gredemark.
Support from UU Innovation
Zekeriya Kazanci uses the services of UU Innovation free of charge for students, researchers and staff at Uppsala University. He receives business development coaching and support from intellectual property advisors. Recently, he has also received funding to protect different aspects of his product and to explore production possibilities and make a marketing plan. He has also participated in their Idea exploration programme and is now part of the Mentor programme, where he has been matched with a mentor who started and sold a company that developed knowledge-based board games.