While ‘elaborate’ may be a fitting adjective to describe the tasks in this chapter, I am by no means using it as a synonym for ‘difficult’. These tasks are elaborate in the sense that they contain a wide variety of sequential components or stages. Some of them extend into medium- or longterm projects. For this reason they may be better suited for teachers and learners who have already ‘levelled up’ by developing their technical, creative and project-management skills while working through some of the earlier activities. Activity 9.8: Coming up … , for example, tasks the learners with writing, creating, editing and sharing their own television shows, complete with introductory theme music, titles and green screen effects. Only a short time ago, this would have required prohibitively expensive, specialized hardware and software. Now, many of the learners are carrying around powerful, multi-purpose television studios in their pockets.

Activity 9.7: Half-baked remake is one of the most creatively elaborate projects as the learners produce (deliberately bad) remakes of famous Hollywood blockbusters. Activity 9.6: Invader is an example of a pervasive mobile game . Pervasive games extend gameplay beyond the typical boundaries of play such as boards (e.g. Scrabble), courts (e.g. tennis) or screens (e.g. video games) and into the real world. They are sometimes described as ‘games that surround you’, as the lines between the game world and the real world become blurred. I designed this game to provide a context for learners to use English outside the relatively sterile confines of the classroom, to engage with people, places and objects in a more situated and embodied manner. This is especially important for learners in non- English-speaking countries. The game places the learners in the role of aliens who have just arrived on Earth. They are on a pre-invasion reconnaissance mission to study human behaviour, places and objects, and so must try to blend in as they use their mobile devices to record on-the-fly video reports and document their observations.

I originally designed this game to use with the extremely large groups of mixed-ability learners I was teaching at a university. The classrooms were designed for lecture-style teaching, and so both the physical surroundings and the sheer number of learners made communicative language teaching quite a challenge.