Game-based learning is changing how students engage with English, and Ice Maze is proof it doesn't take a big budget to make it happen.
Created by James Abela, Director of Digital Learning and Entrepreneurship at Garden International School and author of the best-selling Gamified Classroom book, Ice Maze is a free, browser-based maze game built with Phaser.
Its goal: turn the boring parts of English learning into something students actually want to do. And it's working. Teachers from Malaysia to the United States have already adopted it in their classrooms, and James himself has been surprised at how quickly they've taken it on.
What Makes It Work in the Classroom
Ice Maze is built around colourful semantics, a teaching method that uses colours to help students understand sentence structure. Each colour represents a word role: orange for WHO, yellow for WHAT DOING, green for WHAT, blue for WHERE, and purple for HOW.
Players navigate a maze collecting words in the correct order to build grammatically correct sentences, learning structure through play rather than memorisation.
The game includes 8 progressive stages, from simple two-word sentences all the way to complex multi-clause structures. Before each session, teachers can adjust time limits, obstacle count, and hints to match any level in the class.
Free, Open Source, and Ready to Use
There's no sign-up, no subscription, and no cost. It works on desktop, tablet, and mobile, with drag and drop now supported on Android and iPad.
Students can play directly at the link below, and educators or developers can explore the full source code on GitHub.