CLIENT

Harvard University is a private, Ivy League school famed for being the oldest institution for higher learning in the United States.

BRIEF

The Director of Language Programs approached us, via our partners at Wonda VR, to create a murder-mystery game using Chat GPT in an online 3D environment, to allow students to practice French via both speech and text.

PROJECT

We worked with Nicole Mills, the Director of Language Programs, to transform the experience from:

a one-off in-class murder mystery where the students can only interact with their characters in spoken French during that class period

into

an available-on-demand module for students to play and interact with their characters in-class and out-of-class while practicing both their spoken and written French.

This process took place over several steps

• ensuring the narrative remained coherent with the course learning objectives, despite the delivery modality of web 3D

• designing and creating the 3D environments and assets important to the game

• accompanying the 80+ students in creating the visual incarnations of murder-mystery characters they had been developing throughout the semester, then integrating these characters into the game

• engineering the prompts for the “murderer” and “non-murderer” AI character types in a way that facilitated intrigue

• training the 10 instructors (professor, TAs, staff) how to access and run the experience in class with the students

First, our pedagogical engineers and game designers sat down with Nicole to understand the pedagogical objectives of the course and the role of the murder mystery game within the syllabus. We adapted the murder mystery narrative accordingly, such that there was a natural flow between the in-person class experience and the virtual murder mystery experience. Then, it was time to design and create the 3D environment in which the murder mystery narrative took place, an apartment overlooking the famous Centre Pompidou in the heart of Paris!

Once this was done, we had the pedagogical, narrative, and visual context in place to bring the scene to life. What remained was designing the interactions and the characters. Along with Nicole, we felt it best to incorporate the students as much as possible in the character aesthetic as their assignments throughout the semester had been to build out backstories, personalities, and alibis for the characters that would take part in the murder mystery. We led several sessions guiding the students in customizing the visual appearance of their characters so that they would have the enjoyment of seeing their work personified in a manner true to their vision for the characters.

Once the students had created avatars for their characters, we engineered the prompts for Chat GPT such that there were “murderer” and “non-murderer” player types who understood the murder mystery scenario and who used the students’ character development work to play their roles no matter what sort of inquiry they received. Finally, we conducted trainings with Nicole, the TAs, and the technical support team member to ensure that the experience was properly deployed in class so as to realize its potential as a learning tool for practicing both spoken and written French.

LINK

Read more about French 11 here.

Schedule a demo or conversation about developing a game-based learning module with GPT here.