ESL speaking practice has a presentation problem. The activity itself is the most important thing students do in a language classroom, but it doesn't look like much from the outside. Two students sit opposite each other and take turns talking. There's no visible score, no animation, no celebration when a good answer happens. For students used to phones, games, and short-form video, the contrast is brutal.
This is why so many ESL teachers reach for quiz tools. The quiz tool looks engaging. The pair-work session, however much more effective, looks like a worksheet. Teachers know what builds fluency, but the energy in the room often pulls them towards the option that produces less English.
YapYapGo is a classroom speaking practice tool for ESL and EFL teachers. Fun Mode is its answer to the presentation problem: an optional team-competition overlay that adds the visible, animated, celebratory layer on top of pair speaking work, without ever replacing the speaking itself. It launched in two flavours: Bubble Blast and Fun Run. This post walks through how both work and why the design matters.How Fun Mode fits with the rest of YapYapGo
Every YapYapGo session starts with the same setup. The Team Maker splits the class into teams of up to five. The Topic Generator seeds discussion questions from 20 topic categories, graded A2 to C1. The Classroom Timer caps each round.
Fun Mode is layered on top of that. It's a single toggle. The speaking mode (Conversation, Topic Discussion, Debate, IELTS, etc.) continues to run exactly as it would without Fun Mode. The difference is that there is now a visible game in the background, scoring as teams complete their speaking turns. Turn this off and you have a pure speaking practice session. Turn it on and you have the same session with the visible energy that quiz tools usually monopolise.
Bubble Blast: physics-based scoring during pair work
Bubble Blast is a classic-style bubble shooter, sized for a classroom projector. The board is 14 columns wide and starts with 6 rows of bubbles. Each team gets a colour. Up to five teams can play simultaneously - purple, orange, green, red, and blue.
The aim arc has 15 slots arranged around a centre cannon, so aim is precise enough to be read from the back of the room. Team-coloured bubbles are worth 10 points when cleared. Neutral bubbles, which break up team chains and force interesting plays, are worth 25.
Power-ups spawn sparsely on the grid. Three flavours are in play: bomb (clears a hit cell and its six neighbours), horizontal (clears the whole row), and vertical (clears the whole column). They all have visible, satisfying effects, which matters because a power-up that quietly fires and does nothing is a bad design.
The board self-refills when it falls below 45% full, so the game never stalls because there's nothing to shoot at. Two new rows drop from the top and play continues.
For ESL fairness, the engine generates 24 candidate board layouts at every spawn and picks the one whose per-team chain potential is most evenly distributed. This sounds technical, and it is, but the practical effect is that no team gets handed a hopeless starting position because the random number generator happened to scatter their colour into singletons.
Fun Run: 3D track race driven by team turns
Fun Run is the more dramatic of the two. Each team gets a 3D runner on a multi-lane track, and the runners advance when the team completes a speaking turn. The races last as long as the speaking activity does.
The lanes are seeded with three things:
- Gems for bonus points when a runner sweeps through them.
- Hazards to clear or avoid. There are three severities: soft hazards (hurdles the runner hops over), hard hazards (slime and spikes that trip and slow the runner), and critical hazards (cliffs to leap and boulders to dive under).
- Power-ups: shield, magnet, multiplier, flying, attack, and mystery box.
A shield will absorb one critical hazard hit and trigger a fall-and-recovery animation instead of a wipeout. A magnet pulls nearby gems towards the runner. A multiplier doubles incoming score. Flying lifts the runner over a stretch of hazards. Attack and mystery box are exactly what they sound like.
Critically: runners only advance when their team speaks. Standing still is the default state. The track is decoration until the speaking happens. This is the design hinge of Fun Mode and it's worth dwelling on.
Why "the game runs alongside speaking" matters
Most gamified ESL tools fail the simplest design test: can a student win without speaking English? If the answer is yes, the tool is a quiz dressed up as a game and it won't build fluency. (We have written about this category problem at length, and broken down the direct trade-offs against Kahoot for ESL specifically.)
Fun Mode is built so the answer is no. Bubble Blast scoring is gated to the rhythm of the speaking - shots are released when a pair completes a turn, not whenever a student feels like it. Fun Run runners only move when the team speaks. The track is animated, the bubbles are colourful, the music is there, but none of it produces points unless English is being produced too.
This is the whole point of Fun Mode and the whole reason it was built. It is not a quiz with a YapYapGo logo on it. It is a celebration layer that depends entirely on the speaking happening underneath.
Practical tips for running Fun Mode
A few things teachers have asked about:
- Start without it. Run your first YapYapGo session in Conversation or Topic Discussion mode with no Fun Mode. Students get used to the rhythm of pair-work first. Add Fun Mode in lesson two or three when the speaking habit is already there.
- Use it in short bursts. Fun Mode rounds work best at 5 to 10 minutes. Long enough for the game to develop, short enough that the visual energy doesn't fatigue.
- Switch which game you use. Bubble Blast suits classes where students are sitting and discussing. Fun Run plays well when the class is more energetic and benefits from the visible race dynamic. See the setup guide for the in-product walkthrough.
- Don't let the game crowd the talk. If you notice students watching the screen more than they're talking, pause Fun Mode for a few rounds. The speaking is the activity. The game is the celebration.
The bottom line
Fun Mode is the answer to the question "how do I make ESL speaking practice look as engaging as a Kahoot session, without losing the speaking?" Bubble Blast and Fun Run handle the presentation; the pair-work underneath handles the language acquisition. Both games are designed so the speaking is the engine that drives them. Turn Fun Mode on, run a normal speaking session, and watch the room light up without losing a single minute of English.
Sources:
- YapYapGo Fun Run engine: `lib/fun-run/types.ts`, `lib/fun-run/session.ts`.
- YapYapGo Bubble Blast engine: `lib/bubble-blast/constants.ts`, `lib/bubble-blast/engine.ts`.