hangman games for teachers

One of the most popular children’s word games, Hangman has been played since Victorian times. Although many adults find the gallows and hanging man motif inappropriate, due to the inherent brutality of the imagery, it is precisely this brutality that appeals to children and has sustained the game’s popularity over the years.

Many attempts have been made to sanitize the game by replacing the gallows and hanging man with less violent imagery. One such example is apples falling from a tree, but falling apples lack the ruthless appeal that hanging has for many children.
 
For teachers, Hangman is often used in the classroom for spelling practice, vocabulary review, or just to entertain students at the end of a class. There are several ways to play, but the most typical is to draw a pitchfork on a piece of paper or on the board and then invite the player to guess the letters of the unknown word. Each wrong guess sees a part of the hangman added to the picture. The head is the first thing added followed by the body, legs and arms. If the image is completed before guessing the word, the game is lost and the figure is hung.
 
The number of possible incorrect guesses is determined by how many parts of the figure must be drawn to complete the image. Children often insist that the eyes, nose, and mouth be included in the drawing, and sometimes even the ears. The typical number of guesses allowed is between eight and ten.
 
With twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, allowing too much guesswork virtually guarantees the player will win. This is particularly true if the player employs the strategy. Most kids don’t, but for those who do, and for the many adults who also enjoy playing it, employing a strategy in Hangman greatly increases your chances of winning.
 
The most used letter in English is the letter e. The other four vowels, a, o, iyu are the third, fourth, fifth and twelfth most commonly used letters. The other most commonly used letters in English, in order of use, are t, n, s, h, r, d, and l. By using such letter frequency lists, a Hangman player can increase his chances of guessing the correct word. Of course, less common words like rhythm can destroy such strategies.
 
Teachers will normally use only those words that they know their students will be familiar with, or that they want their students to practice. Since children’s vocabulary and understanding of letter frequency is much lower than that of adults, it is unlikely that they will use any strategy other than guessing the six English vowels, a, e, i, o, whew first. , since they know that all English words, apart from a few, have at least one vowel.
 
Although it was developed in the era of pencil and paper, Hangman still has a place in the modern world, and many versions can be played with the help of a computer. Computers and databases make it possible for a game of Hangman to have an almost inexhaustible supply of words, and these words can be drawn at random, so the same word is unlikely to be played twice. This makes the game an important way to increase vocabulary.
 
Another important use of computer-based hangman games is that they can be prepared with particular word sets or lexicon. Such a lexicon can be valuable to the teacher who wants to limit the content of the game to a list of vocabulary that he wants his students to practice. The computer also makes the game more attractive to the player by introducing multimedia elements such as sounds and movement in the game. With the game’s lexicon safely stored in a database, the game can be played over and over again to recycle the language.
 
The Victorians were the first to play hangman with pencil and paper. Our modern computers would amaze these people a hundred years ago, but there is no doubt that today’s game would have captivated them as much as today’s children.