Past Tense Game

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About

This game is for practicing past tense English verbs. It is intended to be used by ESL (English as a second language) students, to review past participles. The aim of this game is not to explain or communicate the concept of past tense, rather it is just to practice using past tense. The concept of past tense is difficult to illustrate visually and really is better explained by a teacher in a classroom. So, this game is really just intended as a tool to practice verbs and sentences in past tense. The language used is quite basic, but I think it covers almost all of the basic past tense verb forms (regular and irregular) and a few more difficult ones.

There are 3 different tasks in the game. In the first task, you simply have to drag the verbs to match present to past tense forms. The second task requires you to choose the correct word to complete the sentence. Finally, for the third task you have to reorder the phrase. This sequence repeats with different sets of content.

There is also a review screen in which you can see each verb with its past-participle and an image to convey the meaning.

The game uses a timer to give an element of challenge to the game. The timer can be turned of by clicking on the settings button in game.

There are 22 sets of content. Each set has 8 verbs, with a matching image and sentence to convey meaning and context. This gives a total of 176 items. These were selected from lists of basic verbs in English with a slight bias towards choosing irregular past tense forms; although, some verbs that were hard to represent visually were excluded. For example, it is quite difficult to draw an image to show the meaning of the verb 'decide'. I hope that almost all the basic verbs are covered here and that by mastering this game, students will have a comprehensive mastery of all the basic past tense forms.