Creating Interactive Board Games in Language Education: A Review of Tools

This article, written in Polish by Agnieszka Kruszyńska of the University of Łódź and published in 2022 in the journal Homo Ludens, examines how board games traditionally used in classroom language teaching can be adapted for distance learning. It opens by situating games and play within education, tracing the idea from Plato and Aristotle through Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Dewey, and Huizinga, and then turns to the specific use of games in foreign language instruction. A key contribution is its clarification of terminology, distinguishing gamification from game-based learning and game-based pedagogy, and noting that teachers often misapply these labels to traditional word games.

The core of the paper is a comparative review of six free online tools for building interactive board games: Genially, Google Slides, Flippity, Learnhip, Gamestructor, and QuizWhizzer. Each is assessed against criteria including ease of editing, the ability to embed text, audio, and images, visual appeal, support for dice and tokens, integration with other platforms, and support for collaborative play. The author describes each tool's workflow and limitations in practical detail. A recurring shortcoming across nearly all of them is the difficulty of multiple students sharing one board simultaneously, which most tools address only through screen sharing or remote control workarounds.

The review is qualitative and descriptive rather than empirical; it draws on a literature base of language pedagogy and game theory and on the author's own hands-on evaluation, without reporting classroom trial data or learner outcomes. The scope is confined to freely available tools and to the context of foreign language teaching, with the conclusion situating these tools within the postmethod pedagogy era, emphasizing task-based learning, learner autonomy, and distance teaching.