The project “Adventures in Language Learning” is planned as a 2-year project in which the partner consortium develops an innovative way of making a book interactive for language learning and spreading it as a new tool for schools. The idea is to create an app on tablets and smartphones that lets the learners read a book in which they are the main hero. They get to make frequent decisions and a good level of understanding helps them get better results. Their objective is to reach the end of the book without failing at their mission. To accomplish this they have to overcome challenges that will be played out as mini games in which the learners need to master the vocabularies that they encountered in the sections they read. Young generations grow up in a world which is vastly different from the world that existed just a few decades ago. However, educational methods are very slow to change and don’t appropriately reflect the way that young people prefer to learn. For instance, many young people don’t read books for entertainment any more, so learning from a book feels “unnatural” for them. In order to offer great chances of learning that resonate with its target groups the world of education should further explore new approaches and methods of integrating them into school. We address this issue by making a book interactive and adding challenging mini games whenever a contest is needed in the story that train the learner’s language skills and memorization of vocabularies. In recent years serious games have shown an interesting potential to motivate young learners. However, so far very few well-working examples exist that successfully combine high motivation and fun with a solid learning experience. For this reason it is necessary to continue the study of new game approaches that integrate learning content seamlessly into the gameplay. The consortium will create four interactive books for different learner levels in order to test out how well the approach is suited for different age groups and difficulty levels and to find good ways of adapting it to the needs of different learners. The consortium will also create a handbook that will help other educators understand the way the tool is used. The handbook will list recommendations on how the tool can be integrated into their classes and offer them new opportunities in language learning.
The purpose of the project was to let the students create interactive adventure stories and let the teachers share these in a digital app. To use our experiences to develop a method for practice language skills in ICT based learning. You could say it is a project for “gamification as a learning concept”. We wanted to create interactive books where you as a reader have the opportunity to control the outcome of the story based on possible choices. In these choices, the readers face challenges such as "word lists" to develop their linguistic ability. To supplement and make the material available we wanted to produce a teacher handbook. The teacher handbook will guide the user how to use the app as well as guide the teacher how to use the method of writing interactive stories. The main objective for producing these outputs was to explore new and modern language learning opportunities that would motivate our students. We aimed for an immersive approach which would give students the chance to develop initiative and which would fit into the current curriculums so that it could be used on a larger scale.
Language skills are important in the context of a thriving and competitive Europe. However, gaining fluency and confidence in a different language can be daunting, especially for young people. The objective of “Adventures in Language Learning” was to create fun interactive adventure books for mobile devices. In these kinds of stories, the reader is able to make decisions at key points in the story with each decision leading to different story paths. Reading gets fun and easy to adapt. But more importantly, neuroscience tells us that simply studying intensely for hours does not result in retention, but having to use the information one has studied, does. The nature of the books is that comprehension is quickly and often tested, but in a non-stressful way. This is especially helpful with young people who suffer from testing and grade anxiety. ALL is an interdisciplinary approach to modern language learning with focus on technology, innovation, and the development of literacy skills. The 20-century skills highlight these abilities as important competence to develop for the future. The project's goal was to promote a comprehensive approach to language learning and to innovate education with ICT as a resource in language learning.