The Design and Development of an Educational MMORPG to Teach English Vocabulary

Kuo-Hsun Hung · Cheng-Ling Alice Chen · Charles Kinzer

Wed., June 10, 5:00–7:00, Great Hall (4th floor, Central)

Ed–Wonderland is an educational MMORPG to increase English–language learners’ vocabulary proficiency while playing, learning, sharing, collaborating, competing, chatting, and completing quests in its virtual environment. Its goal is to let students living in non–English–speaking countries have a content–rich English learning environment reflective of the target language, and to form an online English learning community through game play and learning.

Ed–Wonderland has five areas: Welcome Island, where first time users acquire information needed to play Ed–Wonderland; Community Island, where all residents of Wonderland live; Educational Island, where most educational content/activities are presented; Forest Island, where players compete with creatures around vocabulary knowledge to “level up”; and Carnival Island, where individual or multiplayer educational games are provided.

Players can gain four types of value in the game. The Intelligence value indicates the learners’ academic achievements. The Experience value represents level of engagement, measured by the number of activities completed (games, vocabulary, quests). The Money value allows players to virtually buy items including clothes, furniture, houses, etc. The Energy value relates to a player’s speed and health status. These game values help players monitor their game status and learning.

Ed–Wonderland was designed to incorporate sociocultural, metacognitive, and multiple context theories of education, which have been shown to have positive influences in teaching and learning. A sociocultural theory of learning avers that human intelligence originates in a society or culture, and individual learning results from interaction with one’s social environment (Vygotsky, 1978). Learning results from the accretion and reorganization of individual knowledge structures and the conversations and collaborations that groups of learners conduct. Thus, Ed–Wonderland provides graphical chat functions, competition, collaborative activities and embedded games to address social factors, and official websites for asynchronous communication. Metacognitive theory indicates that the ability to monitor one’s learning is linked to better performance (Mayer & Wittrock, 1996). MMORPGs can facilitate metacognitive strategies as they are permanent platforms where players’ achievements are not erased and can be thought about strategically over time. Multiple context theory indicates that knowledge taught in a single context is less likely to support transfer than knowledge taught in multiple contexts (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Educational MMORPGs can embed multiple contexts within an environment; thus designers can provide different contexts to support a given concept’s learning.

Designing educational MMORPGs requires consideration of different game design perspectives. We present the following suggestions:

• Embed different types of games and activities across contexts in an environment to attract and motivate players with different gaming/learning styles
• Invite the target audience to play and attend to facilitating interaction among players
• Consider both educational theories and fun when drafting an activity or game
• Evaluate along the whole development process
• Provide well–structured, easily–found content and activities in the world
• Update the content regularly
• Provide synchronous and asynchronous service

Finally, enhancements to Ed–Wonderland will be presented, including the extension of teaching materials to other educational “towns” on Educational Island, and the theoretical effect of including voice and video conferencing technology in the MMORPG. A working demo of Ed–Wonderland will be available at the poster station.