This project sits especially close to our heart. Why? We had to find a way for young people to learn about history, critical thinking and analysis. To learn for their future.
Our idea - A serious browser game
Keeping students and teachers in mind, we had the challenge of creating a game that makes learning about the deportations more interactive while ensuring a dignified epxerience. We developed a realistic setting inside an old attic populated with clues and pictures from a deportation. The goal was always to encourage the player to find out about the events of the deportation on their own. In cooperation with the #lastseen team we based the game play in today's time: The player would be an investigative journalist uncovering previously unknown images and sources. We consciously avoided historical role play or history altering storylines.
Dusty and full of discoveries. The attic.
Letting the users write their own notes about the pictures was a way of abstracting the real-life work of historians into an exciting game mechanic. Even though the amount of keywords to be discovered in each picture is limited, the players are encouraged to keep paying attention to details by not showing how many are left to discover. Without noticing, the players are assimilating a great deal of complex information about the deportations in nazi germany.
Unlock Paragraphs
When certain particularly relevant keywords are discovered in the notes, paragraphs and blocks of information are unlocked in the blog post. With this reward mechanism, we aimed to keep the players engaged and willing to keep discovering.
