Serious gaming as a tool
Waag Society has a long tradition when it comes to using serious gaming in educational concepts. One of the first games we developed was called ‘DemiDubbel’s Time machine’, a visual internet environment in which pupils of two schools went for a hunt through art history. The game made abundant use of visuals and was developed on our own KidsEye software. This framework was further developed and used in many projects around 2004-2006.
KidsEye provided an online multimedia environment that allowed children to become the main editors within educational projects. They could use KidsEye to publish their online content like articles and add all types of media available, such as pictures, video and sound. Later gaming projects include Teylers’ Adventure, Frequency 1550, MonsterMedia, Operation Sigismund and Architect-toon, all mobile gaming adventures and interactive games on location. In each of these games, the key players were the pupils themselves as media producers, learning along the way when advancing in the game. More recent examples are the embodied learning installations that also contain game elements and the online web application we built for the Tijdgeest foundation.