AdventurED Module: Discover Countries in Antura

Mission

Introduce kids to the cultural elements of a country with a flexible tool to allow any style of teaching.

Game Play

Short adventures where kids explore the places, talk to people, solve puzzles, find objects. We start from planet earth, select a country, and the the "quest" to be played.

Story

The player plays the Cat who has to find Antura that ran away making a mess wherever it goes.

Education

All places are simple recontructions of real places. There are images / photos of elements, dialogs about the topics with people (the Living Letters) giving some knowledge and making some questions.

The trasmission of knowledge is indirect by playing the adventure, with some direct elements when the player is asked a specific question to go on.

THe cultural elements and the specific topics to be inserted into the gameplay are coordianted with the teachers. We as game designers can then create the easiest and enjoyable way to explore it.

All dialogs are spoken in both the country language (say french in France) and the native language of the player.

Quest Framework

Before creating the game, we created a tool to write the didactical quests. It is called "Homer" and is an online interactive storytelling platform that allows us to work together with the teachers to create the stories, the interactivities, the dialogs, the length of the mission. Each story is then exported into the 3D game. All dialogs and translations are managed and validated in this web tool. So all educators can see everything that will be presented to the kids, all details, before playing the full game!

Quest Game Design

When the core gameplay is consolidated, with common elements (3D objects, characters, objects, music, coding) we have just to write the quests and inject them into the game. We designed the Antura "AdventurED" module to allow thousands of quests of any country. And anybody could create new one to propose. We already had a dozen created by game design students. And since the project is open source it will be nice to engage new collaborators to help the project. In this way we can also experiments with different ways to introduce the cultural elements: it could be a more story driven quest, or an espace room. A journey or a labyrinth, an exploration to find an object or an arcade game to undertand a sport's rules. We could allow any kind of interactivity.. since it is written in the tool!

Next Steps

Finalize the current game features and write the first 7 french quests, so to have some good material for next tests. When we are satisfied we can start with Poland. Poland teachers can already start to write the cultural elements they want to put into the quests, and maybe write a first draft of them.

In next year we'll develop also the external features to improve the game (classroom mode, teacher panel, new user profile creation)

Who to Test

The Antura 3.0 is already in open beta: anybody with a iOS (or Android, soon) device can get the new versions and test it. We'll provide an update each month with a detailed list of new features, changes and bugfixes. The Platform will allow testers to write us some feedback.