91 essencial learning goals!

This article is a part of the White Paper series of posts which will go into detail about each of the topics that compose it, including Liber Domus, the game that puts into practice everything we discuss here. The White Paper will be released in early September.

Keep in touch to learn more about our work during the next weeks, as well as Liber Domus and all the new features as we approach the start of 22/23 school year.

To make sure that Liber Domus, the world's first 3D educational and roleplaying adventures game in the world, had all the required elements of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences curricula for the 6th grade, we implemented a total of 91 essential learning goals!

Ninety one.

Since the moment the student first uses the game, until it is finished. Between adventures, challenges, conquests, and stories that go through an entire fantastic society. Between buildings, streets, societies, libraries, palaces, forests, towers. Interacting with hundreds of characters, each with different personalities, backstories and dialogues. The player goes through all of the essencial educational objectives required to excel in the school year.

This was a goal set by Kendir Studios at the start of development for Liber Domus. We admit we didn't know what it really meant. Now, as we review all steps, processes, systems, mechanisms developed and assure we deliver a game free of bugs and with accompanying functionalities that several teachers and students requested during previous testing, the enormity and complexity of the effort is in full display.

Are you sure?

It's natural to be be in disbelief. Or to assume that all the players are going to get is an introduction to the subjects.

It's understandable. Usually, educational games are seen as tools to motivate students to discover more about a topic. Or used to reinforced, in a less boring way, boring subjects. Or, to allow students to visualize and interact with complex concepts.

Most educational games and gamified experiences are similar in architecture, presenting small compositions and mixture of mechanisms that focus on specific subjects. When these games are different, there's hardly an effort to introduce story and context into learning, guiding development towards repetition.

However, Liber Domus is composed of multiple adventures, that, from different angles and approaches, and through multidisciplinary methodologies, introduces each of the essential learning goals, together with assessment and feedback mechanics and all the information and support systems required. So, yes, we are sure!

"Just" that?

No! We know that, just as students learn in different rhythms in a classroom, students also progress differently when playing. So, it's normal some students might not remember everything they learned a few months previously or need specific reinforcement.

That would lead to a fragile or insufficient learning experience. So, we made sure that, previously to the start of the 6th grade contents, there's enough revision of 5th grade content. During gameplay, the student is encouraged to reinforce subjects, and, before the game ends, all the learning objectives are reviewed in additional quests.

So, Liber Domus is not "just that", it's much, much more!

But... Why?

It has been scientifically proven that contextualized learning of any educational content improves performance and long-term knowledge retention rates.

This contextualization, which we keep mentioning at Kendir Studios, allows students to create emotional bonds with the contexts in which the challenges emerge, with the characters and stories that surround them. Strong emotions create long lasting memories.

For us, it wouldn't make any sense to create a game for each learning goal. We felt we should create an extensive story and world to support visually and emotionally the student. When the game design stage was concluded, we noticed we could easily introduce an entirety of two year-long curricula without actually overloading the game. This contextualization inside a custom-made extensive and story-like world allowed immersion into extraordinary levels of focus. Why wouldn't we want to give students higher knowledge retention and focus while playing?