Learn2Teach

I created this game: "Learn 2 Teach" when I was studying at HTW Berlin.

It took some time to bring it to a publishable state. I participated in a digital game-based learning course and a part of it resulted in the creation of this project. "Learn 2 Teach" is inspired by "Game Dev Tycoon" and "Portal 2". In this game, the player takes on the role of an instructor who teaches Physics in a college for a year. The goal is to finish the academic year with every student in the class receiving good grades.

• Logo
• Unity WebGL

"Learn 2 Teach" was developed in four iterations. Significant changes for each iteration are listed as follows:

1. In the first version, the player can plan and repeat the teaching unit. The unit's gameplay resembles that of a Whac-a-mole game. The user clicks on red bubbles to discipline students and blue bubbles to answer questions. The act of answering questions increases the understanding of the students and, in turn, increases the grades. The students have two basic forms of personalities: passive and active. If the player does not discipline the active students, signaling by the red bubbles, then they will start to interrupt the class. This can influence their direct surroundings which then result in fewer questions being asked.
2. In this version, the Whac-a-mole’s gameplay is removed due to two reasons:
   • It did not realistically represent how a teaching unit is conducted.
   • The acts of punishment and approval were weighted equally even though punishing students should be used as a last resort.
   Thus, this version focuses more heavily on class preparation and the use of different teaching methods. An extra planning phase was added along with more diverse personalities (active, inquisitive, etc.), and the teaching unit was changed from time-based to turn-based. This way, there is a synergy between the students' personalities and teaching methods.
3. In the third iteration, faces were added to represent the state of mind of the students. This way, their mood was easy to understand, but not as clear-cut as a table with values.
4. The last iteration was mainly bug-fixing, adding more animations, and adding feedback to some teaching methods (For example: Flash Learning, Mind map, etc.).

In principle, “Learn 2 Teach” is an interesting game idea. I believe people can learn different teaching methods through this application. It still needs more refinement and testing, but I think young players can understand the bigger picture of teaching and learning.

However, there are still several weak spots in the current game:

1. All teaching methods are considered indifferent in terms of usage and result. In reality, certain teaching methods are more suitable for certain topics, and vice versa.
2. The current source of enjoyment arises from funny animations and trying to achieve a high score at the end of the game. More short-term positive feedback in every learning unit is needed to consistently engage the player.
3. The target audience has also never been defined. Is this game for kids or teachers in training?
4. No study has been done on how effective this game is in helping people learn.

Although the project is shelved at this point, it was an interesting experience working on it. It would need a more concrete use case for it to be worth updating. Nevertheless, you could say to publish "Learn 2 teach" on my website there is a fifth iteration. The methods were translated into English with the help of Wanwisa Boonchub. I also added a Tutorial to give basic instruction to the player.

Contributors

• 3D-Art: Kay Andre, Tim Priebe
• 2D-Art: Wendy Lopez
• Animation: Kay Andre
• Game Design: Mihail Georgiev, Franziskus Heblich, Hannes Plaumann, Alex Sokolov ,Maxim Suckow
• Programming: Franziskus Heblich
• Translation: Wanwisa Boonchub, Franziskus Heblich

German Text for teaching methods by Reich, K. (Hg.): Methodpool. In: url: http://methodenpool.uni-koeln.de 

May 8, 2021  
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Game Dev. , HTW-Berlin , Unity3D