Gamification

Our virtual German city project, #pfefferhausen, will continue to grow in the 2016/17 academic year. I will write more extensively about the growing project in the coming months, and a couple of conference presentations are also in the works. At this point I wanted to give a brief update about our status and new developments.

• We expanded and now our 2nd semester students are already becoming virtual citizens and creators.
• In the fall, 3rd semester students will participate again. This time, they will receive their tasks and missions through a gamification engine built into our site so that students have more agency and can track their process. More on that soon.
• I am moving the site to our own server to have more control.
• I will implement a game-based task/mission/quest system that allows students to level up and watch their progress. In-game units will include experience and Euros. Most missions will reflect real-world tasks, like recording a 5-minute conversation or planning or attending an event.
• In general, our virtual city will go and students will have more agency in their own learning.

More to come soon, I look forward to reporting back in the fall about this exciting project.