Revelation - Special Features
Revelation - an introduction for teachers
What is Revelation?
This is Revelation - an extreme cloze exercise. Its forebears are famous in the world of English and ICT - Reveal, Developing Tray, Sherlock all added something to the process.
How does Revelation work?
Revelation, quite simply, strips the letters and spaces from a text, leaving only the punctuation. Players have two choices - they can buy letters from the computer for ten points each, or they can guess letters and score points.
Buying a letter is easy - simply click on the letters at the foot of the screen and every instance of that letter will be filled in. Your score will drop by ten points. To begin with it is always an idea to buy a selection of strategic vowels and consonants to give yourself a scaffold to build your guesses on. You will also be offered the spaces between words for 50 points - resist the temptation to buy them unless you are truly stuck.
Guessing a letter involves clicking on the small box where you think the letter is and typing it in. You will notice that the cursor leaps to the next empty box. If you wish to stop there, simply press Return or Enter. If your guess is correct your score will go up. If it is wrong in any part your score will drop 10 points.
Scoring
The scoring scheme is very generous to ambitious or brave guessers and mean to timid ones. Type one letter in and you score one point. Type in five or six and you'll see your score climb exponentially. Scores in the high thousands are possible.
If you happen to know the poem already, you'll find your score is satisfyingly high, but beware - a single mistake, wherever it occurs in your guess will lose you ten points. Guesses have to be absolutely correct to score anything.
Using Revelation in the classroom
Puzzles like Revelation have been extensively written about - Bob Moy, the original inventor of Developing Tray, is very well worth reading on the subject. Suffice it to say that you can discover a wealth of useful discussion going on as the hidden text emerges from fog into clarity. The puzzle becomes genuinely addictive and the competitive scoring system encourages bold thinking. Strange by-products have been noted, such as the way playing the game unconsciously fixes the words in your mind. After an intense solving session, you'll find you know surprisingly high proportions of the text by heart.
Revelation works in an Internet window and exploits the hypertext potential of the medium. It therefore allows us to link the puzzle to other puzzles, or pages of supporting information about the text. This can be offered as part of the process of solving the puzzle or as a reward for its completion.
As an introduction to a text that will be studied by the whole class, Revelation is recommended - no better way to get students engaged in careful study of a single text for a full 30 minutes.
Try it. It'll be a revelation!
Ideas for using Revelation - and literacy links
- Using a projector and interactive whiteboard, the class attempts to reveal a poem. During the course of the game students realise the value of paying attention to grammatical and poetic features (such as rhyme) - and to accurate spelling!
- After studying a poem together, students see who can complete the whole text first - and with the highest score.
- The game begins with part of a text revealed; the hidden text acts as reinforcement of subject matter covered in lessons (such as double letters or common spelling errors).
Share your revelations!
Please let us know of any ideas that occur to you for using Revelation, especially for teaching aspects of literacy.
Send in your comments and examples of students' work to englishonline@actis.co.uk.
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