Teaching to Be: A Path to Wellbeing (2021-2022) is part of a European project funded by Erasmus+. It’s an educational video game for training in professional wellbeing issues in the field of teaching.
The project is made up of partners from eight European countries, including universities, educational institutions, and public organisations. The aim was to improve levels of wellbeing among teachers by means of an online serious game distributed to schools in the European Union.
My work during the two and a half years I was part of the project was the conceptual, game, and narrative design of a serious game entitled Teaching to Be: A Path to Wellbeing.
It was the first time I was faced with the design of an educational game, and the challenge was greater than expected. Not only was the design philosophy radically different from that of a commercial game, but it also involved the difficulty of working with dozens of partners from up to eight different countries, with the cultural and language barriers that this entailed.
The creative process included, among many other things, a great deal of conceptualisation and translation of the educational content into game mechanics and interactive narrative. I tackled the coding and assembly of the game with the GameLearn tool, a 3D editor with visual programming that allows for the fairly immediate construction of conversational adventures for educational purposes. Below you can see a promotional video we shot introducing the project:
In addition to the design and assembly of the game, I led the production of different cutscenes, both narrative and educational, developing the script and supervising the work of the animators.
The game went through several rounds of prototyping and testing by most of the partners, a painstaking task that required a lot of patience and attention to detail. Finally, the game was released in two stages: a first phase in June 2022 and a second phase in December of the same year. Below you can see the final result!
Not that this was my dream job, but I don’t think that as an educational project it deserves to be disdained. I am proud of the results obtained and of the learning process, of the two and a half years of both development and dissemination work (I had to attend two of the project’s general meetings to present results, in Vienna and in Riga), so I can say that I came out of it very strengthened in many professional aspects. What more could one ask for?
