Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) is Australia’s premier game development conference, focusing specifically on skills development, addressing industry trends and international business matching. GCAP delivers thought provoking, creative and innovative sessions covering programming, art, design, management and more, from leaders in the local and international game development industry.
In 2014, Millipede won its largest ever project: ELLA (Early Learning Languages Australia), aka The Polyglots, a multi-million-dollar Australian government trial testing whether 3-5 year olds could learn a language other than English through a program supported by purpose-built apps. Millipede led the learning design, language recording and technical build of 70 apps, as well as a system for tracking and displaying trial data, all within an 18-month period.
To create the apps we formed an internal team of game designers, learning designers and developers, and we were also assigned educational and language experts by the client. This team was tasked with looking at long-standing educational concepts and translating them into playful, playable activities that worked perfectly in any one of five languages.
Educational theorists have been thinking about how learning occurs, and how skills can be gained and built on, for a long time. It was an eye-opening experience to see the depth of expertise in this area being brought to bear on the apps in such an earnest manner. Educators also have strong views about how young children learn through play, but many don’t have experience of using digital tools in playful ways. So there was a huge challenge in incorporating this existing body of knowledge into the design process, and translating teacher-led learning concepts into child-oriented app design and build.
Seeing the value of this existing body of knowledge as part of the design process, we’d encourage other game developers to take an interest in education and consider how it relates to their own work. In this presentation, we’ll introduce the Polyglots series of apps, the scope and the goals of the project. We’ll discuss some of the education theory that shaped it, and the outcomes so far. Along the way we’ll highlight some educational concepts and show how they relate to common game design challenges and solutions.
Then we’ll take a deeper look at play-based learning, and the effectiveness of mixed play styles. We’ll show how this was implemented in the range of activities present in the Polyglots apps. We’ll finish with a look at how this mix of play styles works to incredibly successful effect in Minecraft.
