French Club for Not the Usual Customers

 This week one of my Year 8s wanted to show me something he had brought in to show the Assistant Head. It was something called a DS. And he wanted to know if I had heard of them. He was going to suggest that pupils could bring them in to school to keep themselves amused once the government's phone ban came in.

I told him, Yes, I had heard of a Nintendo DS. And in fact, if it helped his cause, we used to have a Nintendo DS French Club at lunchtime.

This was in the days when pupils bringing an expensive item of electrical equipment into school raised eyebrows, so they were brought to me first thing and locked in my office until lunchtime. And then they came along and played games in French. I learned from Ewan McIntosh at Language World 2007 that if you switch a Nintendo device into another language, most of the games then swap automatically into the language too.

The main games I remember were Nintendogs, Cooking Mama, and the Brain Age game that Ewan demonstrated at Language World. All of these worked brilliantly in French. Nintendogs meant they had to keep up their French all week, otherwise the dogs would start to misbehave and forget the commands. Cooking Mama meant that they could follow recipe instructions and work with ingredients all in French. It was like an interactive version of the magazine recipe cards we used in the 1990s. I am sure there were also some Mario Kart races using the devices' ability to communicate with each other wirelessly.

If you know where to look, you can find me on the Joe Dale podcast in 2008 talking in unguarded and over-enthusiastic terms about the "kind of pupils" who came along. It definitely didn't attract the "usual customers" who would turn up to a French club. But they enjoyed it, they enjoyed being in the French department, and they learned some French. (I wrote here about the A Level pupil who knew the word for "beehive" in Spanish because of playing video games when she was younger.)

I suppose the up-to-date version I would like to try, would be to get hold of a video console and hook it up to the projector to play Fifa with the commentary swapped to French or Spanish. I had a Year 11 class who did this at home and were very fond of shouting, "Peligro, peligro" every time the word came up in lessons.

Or maybe if phones are banned, pupils will have to go back to GameBoys and the DS!