ok rant ahead about gamification
i have been so so SO done with xp or fantasy currency and cosmetics being slapped on something and someone trying to sell you a product that will "teach you through playing a game!!!" when it barely qualifies as that. and it's just.. what? study cards? delightful. im sure they work for some people to keep them motivated to learn, but they are not learning through play, they are learning still in traditional methods and just returning to the app out of habit.
and having xp or cosmetics by itself is not play.
soooo guess what i'm making a game that helps with second language learning through actual play :)
yes the rant was an excuse to talk about this project to motivate myself to get back on my obsidian board and continue writing for it.
but anyways, it's a minecraft server with a questline that students and a teacher go through in topics and grammar increasing in difficulty, always staying slightly ahead of where the students are. they can only speak the second language, except to translate, but then having to say or ask the final sentences in the second language. i learned french this way and it was really fast, even through i felt like i was horrible at it constantly and that I wasn't improving (i was, the material just kept getting harder at a good pace).
but anyways, im using german for the first run of this server to test on my little lab rats (friends) since they wanted to learn german. but i wanna work on making it accessible to any teacher, with a control room in game set up to run commands that set up each quest, and since it's a server i use plugins to make the questlines accessible ingame - all in the target language ofc.
the project has a teacher since it does not replace traditional classroom learning, but the game is a familiar space that already has interaction baked in due to its multiplayer sandbox nature, and so many people played minecraft they tend to know what each item is - and it's now all set to the second language, so they are passively learning from reading. The quests force them to communicate about the task they have to do, and it's not just fetch quests but they get to have fun building things together :3
