Sandbox-MMO for language learning

Play-to-learn-and-earn MMO to share the learning experience and collaborate in safe, active, explorable and community-built 3D environments.

UX/UI Design, Full-Stack-Dev, Plutus/Atala Pioneer, Sound/Generative Artists, Procedural Modelling, Cultural Scientist, Translator, Game Dev

We are building a major next-gen game that provides a virtual space for everyone in the Cardano ecosystem to meet, learn and share. The world and value that emerges from this activity is a reason for people outside the blockchain space to enter it and engage with the ecosystem and vision. This also complies to the SDG no. 4, which is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

At this time, we are forming teams for fourteen different languages, which we think are of special importance to the Cardano ecosystem. These are:

English, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, French, Japanese, Swahili, German, Amharic, Oromo, Indonesian, Russian, Hindi and Portuguese.

"Language is about being able to converse with people, to see beyond cultural boundaries and find a shared humanity". Timothy Doner, super-polyglot

We firmly believe that language proficiency is one of the most crucial factors to overcome national and cultural limitations, collaborate with one another and push self-determined development.

Why did we choose these languages?

The game is playable in all fourteen supported languages. To reach as many people as possible, we included the six official UN-languages (English, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian) and added Hindi + Portuguese for two other massively and widely spoken languages. With these eight languages alone, we are able to offer half of the worlds population access to the game, which is super exciting!

We then thought about recent partnerships of Cardano and how to deliver maximum value and possibilities to these early adopters. In Tanzania, Cardano is building infrastructure with the World Mobile Group, so we added Swahili, which is another really important lingua franca across the African continent. The deal with the Ethiopian ministry of education is why we included Amharic and Oromo.

We recently added Indonesian and German to the list. Together with Japanese, these three languages have huge, active groups of L1-speakers in the Cardano community, which is why we need to strengthen the connections with these ecosystems right from the start.

Why do most people struggle to combine the ideas of playing and learning? The answer is twofold:

First: bad/shallow gamification, which lead to the infamous "chocolate-covered broccoli" problem. In a nutshell: Looks kinda like broccoli, tastes kinda like broccoli, but it's neither chocolate nor broccoli. Adding leaderboards, scores and extrinsically motivating rewards to an otherwise tedious task only has little effect on making the task more enjoyable, you might even feel tricked. Intrinsic motivation is the key to prolongued and self-motivated engagement, and actual games are experts at creating just that.

Second: since literally thousands of years, there is a lingering dualism of game and work. Work, or learning/seriousness, is culturally coded to achieving things in your life through hardship and doing something meaningful. Games, or playing/playfulness, bear the stain of wasting that precious time of yours. This is even leading to the blatantly false assumption that games need to be meaningless for your personal development, or they will cease to be a game. You could not be more wrong. So, let's clean up that stain, shall we?

Games are ideal learning environments

There are heaps of arguments to proof that games are, in fact, ideal learning environments:

Good games are designed to learn, practice and apply knowledge/skills. Games are creative, multi-sensory and intrinsically motivating experiences that allow for moments of flow with just the right amount of challenge to stimulate curiosity and avoid overload. This is crucial for deep learning, prolonged interest and continuous improvement.

Games can provide a safe and guided environment for experimentation, where failure is seen as part of the journey to mastery. Trial and error are encouraged. Games support individual progress through direct feedback loops that help you overcome your limits, over and over again.

MMOs are dynamic and active learning environments for social and collaborative (or competitive) experiences, where content and places are clearly structured and open to self-paced exploration. Players are encouraged to organize themselves in social groups. Sandbox games use the power of the community to create and manage vast amounts of content and interactions. Exploration of deep, rich and interactive content is key to both of these genres, and thus they are ideal for situated learning of complex topics, e.g. languages, in an immersive world.

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What does the game look like?

The game is a low-poly 3D-Sandbox MMO. Each of the supported languages has their own world with a growing and everchanging city + surroundings to explore. Each world is built, governed and inhabited by its community of L1-speakers + experts. You can choose your role as a builder, author, developer, teacher, regulator, or simply learn and participate in the ecosystem. Most important: do what you feel comfortable with and enjoy the way!

Social interaction is key to our concept and we encourage the formation of groups for social/cultural hubs of common interest. The game is designed to share the learning/creative/playing experience with friends and strangers. You can seamlessly interact and connect with other players, e.g. for multiplayer quests or just for a talk and great exercise. We ensure a safe and guided environment with just the right amount of options and scaffolding to best support your efforts, while keeping it enjoyable for everyone.

We keep the barriers low to include as many people as possible. This is reflected in the design of our own level editor which does the heavy lifting for you. Level building is modularized, so you can decide on what you want to contribute. You can focus on what suits you best: world-building, story writing, template design, implementation of a level through existing stories or worlds, or just doing it all yourself!
We are also completely free-to-play, but meaningful contribution to the game will earn you a portion of the game revenue, which gets stored as ADA in a treasury. The game revenue includes optional payments for collectibles etc. as NFTs and we have several plans for different virtual spaces that can be rented by businesses and individuals.

We want to enable people in whatever situation to form social connections, collaborate, share and learn. That is why we stay free-to-play AND play-to-earn - and learn!

Blockchain integration

We have our own native token which is the in-game currency and fuels the system. All revenue streams get exchanged to ADA and redirected to the game's treasury to enable play-to-earn. You can burn your native tokens to redeem your share of the treasury.
All eligible players of each world (L1 + experts) are forming a DAO to govern decisions together. Reputable members of the DAO get a small plot of virtual land to cultivate and build on top of. The land size increases depending on their rank and reputation inside the DAO.
Most items are NFTs (e.g. mounts, pets, cosmetics, collectibles, ...) which you can mint on our platform and trade on marketplaces. We integrate open source wallets (GameChanger, Typhoon, Nami) that best suits our needs at that time.

We issue Verified Credentials for education and reputation. Education Credentials get issued to players DID to prove your learning progress, so when you have reached a certain level in the game, we accredit your skills in the VC. Reputation Credentials are issued in the same manner to govern the membership and DAO status of each world, and prove that you speak or have sufficient command of the first language of that world. Once you have reached a high level in a world, you can earn a Reputation Credential for that DAO. Naturally, if you can prove that you are an L1-speaker of that language, you get immediate access to the DAO. For the future, we are looking into the possibility of issuing VCs for other standards like the CEFR, and perhaps even managing your account via a DID.
For DIDs/VCs/identity wallets, we will leverage one of the open source solution of the community.

Tech

The main game is built on top of the Godot engine and the Cardano blockchain. We are looking into ways to host key components of the game on decentralized infrastructure.
We are leveraging and refining ProtonGraph, an open source tool for procedural modeling and content creation. This is the integral backbone to power our own level editor.

Market

Godot is the biggest open source engine in the world with a market share of 5%, and it's evolving at a rapid pace. Educational games have also seen huge interest and competition in the last decades with double digit growth per year. If you need further proof: Minecraft, the most-sold game in the world with 238 million copies, is building an education series for formal education in classrooms. Games like Minecraft, Roblox or Fortnite, that also offer user-generated content, an own in-game economy and currency, report several hundred million monthly active users each.

Who is behind this?

Educhainment is building tools and game-based learning applications for the Cardano blockchain. We got funded in Fund 6 for the concept phase of this game and are now starting into full production mode.

https://educhainment.com/

We also have three more proposals for different components of the game, which give additional value to the Cardano ecosystem. These are a cross-translation database + Dapp, ProtonGraph improvements and resources to scale and connect 14 digital language hubs.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Advanced-Cross-Translation-Network/382007-48088
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Assisting-14-Digital-Language-Hubs/382940-48088
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Procedural-3D-content-creation-tool/382984-48088

Core team

Mike Dietrich has kicked off the Educhainment-collective and is responsible for audio/sound design, game design, managing/driving the general development process, blockchain concept and gathering collaborations. He is a first-cohort Plutus Pioneer, Atala-Prism-Pioneer, cultural scientist, teacher, musician, lifelong gamer and a big proponent of game-based learning.

www.educhainment.com

Gilles Rivière, better known as HungryProton, is an experienced software engineer and full stack developer, mostly responsible for the game development and procedural 3D-tech components. His previous public work for the Godot developer community includes tools like Scatter and ProtonGraph that extend the Godot engine's design capacities and enable non destructive, procedural 3D-modeling.

https://github.com/HungryProton

Ben Jésus Kneiphof had the initial vision for the game. He is responsible for data management, coordination, graphic design, conception and visualization. He is an experienced visual artist and design student, always learning, creating and socializing with other people while new ideas pop out of his head. And naturally he is also in love with video-games.

https://www.instagram.com/bjesusk/

Julian Bauch is our UX/UI designer and front end developer, building innovative interfaces and solving interaction problems. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Design with diverse work experience in software development, front end, UX/UI and real-time generative art projects. Time and again inspired by possibilities, he loves to ask questions and innovate.

https://iuilan.art/

Lucca Maia takes the role of Art Director, responsible for general graphic design and media strategy. He is an accomplished visual artist and holds a degree in Social Communication and Media. He has long years of work experience in graphic design and art direction, both working in small and big teams. He is addicted to creating and a game enthusiast.

https://www.lucartspace.com/

Nora Schumann (she/her/no pronoun) is a political and social scientist who has also studied linguistics, intercultural communication and basic information technology. Nora has many years of experience in teaching German as a foreign language, both with adults and children of all learning levels. She is responsible for everything language related. Her main focus is the collaborative design of the intercultural language learning concept together with the linguists of each language team.

Roadmap

01.11.21 - 01.01.22: Start onboarding of language teams. Create branding, visual identity and material to explain the game. Enhance website + social media to continuously engage with the community and their input right from the start. Create mini-demo/mini-prototype to showcase some features. Localize website content for supported languages.

January 2022: Finish onboarding all language teams. Create intercultural learning concept. Create and execute survey for market research.

February 2022: Refine intercultural learning concept and grow language teams. Create and gather supporting material/guidelines for language teams. Evaluate survey. Finish basic visual identity. Design basic levels for repeating patterns of essential learning outcomes.

March 2022: Create open database for starter set of languages and cross-translate its content. Design in-game tutorials for creating quality content. Build playable prototypes for basic levels and basic world. Begin smart contract writing. Design NFTs.

April 2022: Grow database. Test basic levels and quests. Write/localize quests for all worlds/languages. Integrate wallet + NFT-minting. DAO formation for the language teams.

May 2022: Finish MVP for the game. Finish in-game base content. Design tokenomics.

June 2022: Write whitepaper. Integrate with marketplaces. Finish Atala Prism-integration and SSI-cycle.

Q3 2022: Audit smart contracts. Alpha version. Optimization and improvement until public release (Q4, Q1 2023)

We take it one step at a time. Once we got these initial languages up and running, we want to scale into potentially all fields of learning and subjects, creating one big connected platform for quality learning materials, social interaction and collaboration.

KPIs

1. Amount of content designed for game
2. Amount of language founding teams
3. Size of language founding teams
4. MAU on social media
5. Size of database
6. Number of finished/integrated blockchain components
7. Number of participants in the survey
8. Number of players who tested the prototype

Long term KPIs:

1. Number of credentials issued
2. MAU of the game
3. Number of languages/subjects supported
4. Size of the treasury

Funds required:

The core team focuses on the game framework and assistance for the language founding teams. All participating parties will be paid equally in the game's tokens.

Each of our six core team members gets $1200 per month for part time work. This is enough to at least cover basic costs of living. We are here for the passion and vision, not for the money. As we acquire more funding and partnerships, we will expand our team and hire more specialists to work for us full-time and outsource tasks.

6 members * $20*60h * 4 months = $28800

outsourcing budget: $4800
If we find another Plutus programmer, we will use the outsourcing budget to grow our core team.

Full budget: $33600

IP:

We will make every part of the game and every line of code open source (MIT), modularized and accessible to the community, providing the most value for the ecosystem. We want to create resources for everyone to achieve great things together.

What does success look like?

We created a diverse ecosystem of mutual knowledge and skill sharing, crossing cultural boundaries and privileges. This ecosystem is built to a great deal by the language DAOs. People can connect, learn and work together on collaboratively building a better future for everyone inside and outside the Cardano ecosystem. The value of learning and sharing gets acknowledged.