INSTRUCTIONS: VERY EASY TO READ, DIFFICULT TO WRITE!

As part of our project “We make our board games” we are reflecting a lot about a text that is very present in our lives: instructive texts.

All the board games that we played had one characteristic in common: they all had a set of instructions. It is true that not everybody reads the instructions and this is a real problem. Not reading the instructions can make the game boring or even impossible to play!

Now that we realized about the importance of instructions, it was time to read different sets and focus on their characteristics. We read a set of instructions in the different languages present in the school and we realized that they all had the same characteristics: they were short, direct, simple and sequenced. It was very interesting to do the activity in different languages because it also offered the opportunity to observe the similarites and differences between languages.

It was easy to understand the general idea of all the texts because of some key words very similar to Catalan and Spanish. And we could guess the meaning of difficult words in English just by using this strategy! Of course this was not possible with Arabic, which we learnt is a language that has a different origin and a different alphabet! Can you understand the texts? Can you match them with the set of English instructions?

With all this ideas, we were ready to create our instructions. We started with a simple exercise: a geometrical dictation. We created pictures using different shapes and we had to write or tell the texts so that our classmates could replicate them. Simple? Not really! We discovered that we had to be very precise in doing the instructions and specify very clearly not only the position, but also the size and the colour.

While reflecting about all we have learned about instructions, one Matilda suddenly realized that clear instructions are the basis of COMPUTERS… We will have to test instructions on some of the robots we have at school!