Latin eLearning game development with Alice 2.0 platform

[Andrew Reinhard]

I downloaded and installed Alice 2.0 yesterday and created my first 30-second animated movie (tribe of Persian zombie mercenaries on the battlefield) to try out many of its features. For those of you who don't know, Alice 2.0 is an open source, versatile, easy-to-use introductory platform for developing 3-D games, movies and virtual worlds. It was developed by Carnegie Mellon University as a toolkit for programmers new to game design, and to introduce non-programmers into the logic used in working with 3-D models and environments that perform actions via user-input or through coding affected in a drag-and-drop coding GUI.

At first blush, this platform seems ideally suited for eLearning via gaming, and I am wondering if there are other members out there who have Alice 2.0 experience within this context. My goal is to use Alice 2.0 (although v3.0 is slated to come out sometime in 2008 with models from The Sims replacing the current set of standard people models) to build a Latin-learning/quizzing game.

Not to give too much away, but I think it would be cool to create a questing/adventure game much in the style of Zelda and King's Quest, but in Latin. Quests are given to the main character in Latin to test basic comprehension and vocabulary, and the quests themselves reinforce the language learning by quizzing points of grammar, word order, and the like. I haven't played around with Alice 2.0 enough to know how to enable text entry, but point-and-click is dead-simple, and could be a good start to comprehension testing (example: I could have a quest-giver say, in Latin, "bring me the green grapes", and the player would have to identify the fruit and the color to satisfy the quest requirements). Quests would be graded (simple ones first, and then more complex as other grammar and vocabulary are introduced).

Just a thought, but I think there's real value here. I would welcome comments on my proposed concept, and would love to hear back from anyone who has used Alice 2.0 in creating an eLearning game.

Thanks!


Andrew

[Laura Gibbs]

hi Andrew, I'm guessing you might get more feedback by posting this also at the classroom2.0 ning, where there is a lot of interest in this sort of technology even if I am the lone Latinist over there...

:-)

[Andrew Reinhard]

Hi Laura,

I posted this in a slightly different version earlier today at the Video Games for Learning Ning, but wanted our members here to see what I was thinking about and to weigh in at least on the concept of learning Latin through gaming. I will go to Classroom 2.0 tonight! Thanks for the reminder.