Introducing: Uno, English Edition
I own nothing related to the ‘Uno’ trademark. Please do not destroy me, Mattel 🙏🙇♂️
This is my interpretation of the card game ‘Uno’, but modified for the purpose of teaching English to Japanese school children.
The rules of the game are identical to the original card game, but with a small change. Every time someone plays a card, they must say an English word or sentence. This requirement changes based on the age level and English ability of the group.
For example, a middle school student might say, “I can cook rice”. While an elementary school student might say the color or number of the card. I give my students the freedom to use any illustration or text on the card.
Why Did You Make This?
While teaching, I noticed that student motivation for participating in activities would vary. Some students could breeze through worksheets with no problems, while others would rather do anything else. Some students enjoyed the pre-made English speaking activities, while others would try to avoid speaking at all.
There are a few reasons why I think my activity works:
Students already know the rules
Since I am only an assistant teacher, the primary teacher usually has a well prepared lesson plan that I must follow. But they sometimes give me 10-15 minutes at the end of class to do my own activity. This does not give me much time to explain the rules of the activity in great detail.
I was surprised to learn that most of my students have already played Uno in some capacity. As the Mattel lawyers might tell you, Uno is an international game played all over the world. This saves precious minutes that can be used for actual activity time. Despite this, my teachers usually like to spend a few minutes explaining everything 🫠. But to be fair, not everyone has played Uno.
Students can help each other
Uno is usually played in groups of 3-7 people. This means that if a student is struggling, all of the other participates can help them out. This can range from pronouncing a word, to giving them an entire sentence. Additionally, students who are waiting for their turn, can listen to the other students who are playing their cards. They can use other student’s answers as an example to prepare themselves.
Its fun!
It might seem obvious, but its true! I’ve seen students who are very shy during English class participate in the game with lots of motiviation, despite their reservations speaking English.
The Inspiration
As much as I would like to take all the credit, this idea was actually taken from a submission on the site ALTopedia. It’s a lovely site for sharing English activities between Assistant Language Teachers. There are many different submissions for this style of activity, but this is the original set I used.
I used them in a couple classes, and they worked great! But there were a few problems with this current design.
- This design was printed on regular document paper and folded in half to prevent see-through. They weren’t very durable, and some students thought they needed to be torn in half 😱.
- The ‘suits’ were not symmetrical and were too small. It was hard to identify the card’s color at a glance.
- The design was very generic, and didn’t look close enough to the original design from Uno.
The Goal
With these design shortcomings, and problems identified from play testing, I set out to make my own design. I wanted to do this for two reasons. One: I wanted to practice my design skills and learn how to use a vector based design software. And two: I wanted to send the final design to a print service for playing cards.
Version 1
The first version was “my take” on the original Uno design.
You can see it looked similar to the design I got from ALTopedia. I added the English Alphabet, so elementary students could study their ABC’s. It also had a single illustration in the center. These illustrations are very popular in Japan. They are a sort of “standard clip art” that many people in Japan use. They all came from Irasutoya. I think they are free designs, but the FAQ is all in Japanese, so I am not entirely sure.
This first design was OK. But it had some problems.
- The design still ‘felt generic’.
- It wasn’t obvious that it was Uno.
- The CMYK for the black colors wasn’t a rich black.
From what I remember, this version was never actually play tested.
Version 2
For the second version, I tried to copy the original Uno design. This included the full color background, and numbers on opposing corners. One major difference was the addition of symbols for students who are color blind.
The color blind design is called ColorADD. Mattel sells an official version of Uno that utilizes this design.
While this design was an improvement, it also had some problems.
- The letters and ColorADD symbols added too much noise to the design.
- Students sometimes asked if they could match two cards with the same letters, when we only allowed matching numbers.
- I forgot the letter ‘N’. Seriously, I don’t know why, but I completely forgot to add cards with the letter ‘N’. I have two physical decks without a single instance of the letter ‘N’.
Version 3
After lots of editing, this is the final version I ended up with.
As you can see, it sticks very closely to the original Uno design, with a couple key differences. The center contains an illustration with a base noun or verb. Each word was taken from the middle school first grade textbook. I felt this textbook was a good compromise between my elementary school and middle school curricula.
Although this design does not contain the letters A-Z, elementary school students can use the first letter of the word provided. For example: Sleep -> The student says, “S!”
This design also features other hidden changes, such as the black color being a true ‘rich black’. This is done by setting the Key color to 100% black, and the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow colors to 50%. I also reduced the safety margins for printing. I did not understand how cut lines worked in the second version, so the white border was a little too large.
In addition to the basic cards, I also designed the actions cards, with a brand new card of my own design.
The New Action Card
Because so many decisions in Japan are decided with rock paper scissors, I wanted to make a special action card to utilize this cultural trend.
This card works the same as the wild card. The player plays the card and picks a color. The twist is that this player then picks another player, of their choice, to play rock paper scissors against. The winner decides if the two players swap hands. I like the depth that this card adds. Note that the rule is “The winner of rock paper scissors decides“. In practice, we usually just treat this as a regular wild card, due to the extra explanation required. But it is a fun card to play.
What Tools I Used
I used Affinity Designer 2 for everything in this project. I had never used a vector based design software before, so I made many mistakes along the way. Overall, it felt intuitive to use. But I don’t know how it compares to the recently released “Affinity” published by Canva, or Adobe Illustrator, for that matter.
I don’t know if printing these cards has any legal consequences, so I won’t mention the printing service I used. But I will say that they Make Playing Cards. Commercially.