An Asterix adventure with MOODLE!

           
‘Bis repetita placent!’ as Caesar exclaimed in ‘Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield’, slightly twisting the famous words originally attributed to the Roman Emperor. ‘Anything pleasing is certainly worth repeating’, as students at IES Maestro Juan María Leonet are finding out…  Paloma Galán and Jesús Melgar Tito tell the tale of when Asterix met Informatix!

A dash of modern technology combined with a classic comic series has proved to be a great way of motivating students at our school. The Asterix adventures consist of a series of 33 comic books created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. And as this year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the first series, what better moment could there be to celebrate the much loved Gaulish warrior?

One advantage comic strips bring to the classroom is that they are a great way of exposing students to a range of expressions and idioms. For example, in a scene from our chosen story Asterix and the Black Gold when Asterix and Obelix battle against pirates, we see Obelix exclaim that their adversaries are ‘a bit soft’ with Asterix punning that they are ‘all at sea’. Interchanges tend to be short and easy to follow, which encourage students to read more.  

    
Acronymix

     
As well as its linguistic objectives, the project aimed to familiarise students with the MOODLE platform. MOODLE is a virtual learning environment that allows you to set up interactive tasks and activities for your pupils to access and complete online. It stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment and it is used in more than 100 countries and translated into more than 50 languages. According to a recent report in elpais.es more than 4000 Secondary schools and universities in Spain are currently using it with their students.

  
MOODLE has about 20 different kinds of resources and activities available on the platform to use. The Resources section enables you to upload any document or create a direct hyperlink to a web page, while Activities include tools to create quizzes, set up discussion forums, wikis and chat rooms. The main strength of this activity-based platform is the ability to combine the activities into sequences and groups, which can help you guide participants through the learning path that you want them to take. Each activity can therefore build on the outcomes of previous ones.

    
Didactix

                    
Most of the stories can be accessed online, for example at http://www.esnips.com/web/AsterixFullCollection?docsPage=3#files. Once students have finished reading the story, we encourage them to use the Glossary activity to make a database of all the main and secondary characters involved in the story, including a short description of each. They are put into small groups, each of which chooses a character to describe (physical appearance, personality, things he/she does in the story, etc) which is then added to the glossary.

   
We encourage them to participate in the chat and forum areas which they can use to ask any questions or make any comments about the story. In the chat room the interaction is spontaneous, whereas the forum is an area where they can leave messages and respond later. These are both controlled and monitored by the teacher, but their informal nature means that responses can come not only from the teacher but also from their classmates. This creates an opportunity to enjoy a new environment based upon comics and culture in English.

    
Grammatix

      
Each individual story often contains recurring examples of a particular grammar point. For example, in Asterix and the Black Gold we can find at least ten examples of auxiliary or modal verbs. The Quiz activity allows us to create a multiple choice exercise based entirely on lines from the story, such as And what can’t be cured must be endured, The magic potion will make us invincible or Now we needn’t go to Babylon. Students are given 3 possible options for each auxiliary verb.

  
The ease with which web pages can be hyperlinked allows us to make full use of the many excellent sites on the web dedicated to English teaching. It also gives students the opportunity to do some preparatory work on the particular language point you wish them to practise in the quiz. For example, sites like www.mansioningles.com have extensive grammar practice activities (there are four on modal and auxiliary verbs in the Verbos section). Another excellent site is www.isabelperez.es

    
Historix

     
One of the main reasons we chose Asterix was because of the wider content areas it draws on. The stories animate historical events and civilisations. Would our students be able to spot all the biblical references in Asterix and Obelix’ arrival in Jerusalem? Or the allusions to Mission Impossible or James Bond? En route to Jerusalem, Asterix and Obelix run into several warrior groups from historical Mesopotamian cultures: Hittites, Assyrians, Medes, etc. What could our students find out about these? We asked them to choose one historical area and answer questions on it in a quiz.

    
Linguistix

    
The backdrop of the Roman Empire brings in ample Latin phrases which provide another useful educational area. We created a matching activity (one of the question types available in the Quiz activity) based around another great feature of the Asterix series: the Latin quotes. Students were encouraged to match phrases such as magnum opus and ave atque vale with their English translations. They could check their answers by visiting the excellent site which translates all the Latin quotes into English: http://www.wattpad.com/117374-List-of-Latin-quotes-in-Asterix

          
Every Asterix story includes a subplot in which animals are the protagonists. The ‘true or false’ option in the Quiz activity made a good comprehension activity about the roles these animals play in the story. Other activities included a short-answer exercise (another Quiz option) to practise the use of onomatopoeias and interjections (another hallmark of many cartoon series) – anything from animal noises such as oink and woof to everyday exclamations such as ouch, phew, whoa and yuck! MOODLE also allows you to create a cloze exercise to test anything from students’ understanding of content to their grasp of the new vocabulary or any grammar structures, which we felt was a good note to end on.

    
The benefits of this project are manifold. On the one hand, students use a medium they enjoy using in much of their spare time and in MOODLE they learn to navigate a new platform. At the same time they learn English in a motivating and interactive way and broaden their knowledge of History. Sol lucet omnibus!

Paloma Galán Redondo and Jesús Melgar Tito teach at IES Maestro Juan María Leonet in Villa del Prado, Madrid.) 

                                                                       
Asterix was written by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. The Asterix stories are currently published by Hachette.

For more information about MOODLE, please visit www.moodle.org