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RESEARCH @ SMU GUILDHALL
Recognized as the # 1 game design graduate program in the world, SMU Guildhall works collaboratively across academic disciplines and industries to translate discovery into meaningful new knowledge to solve social, medical, educational, and community problems for the betterment of society and the enrichment of humanity.
Codex: Lost Words of Atlantis
An Adult Literacy Project
Created to empower low-literate adults to take control of their literacy education, this app couples engaging gameplay with phonological decoding and encoding, as well as morphological awareness. The game is accessible on mobile devices so that learners can operate it from anywhere, at anytime, thereby overcoming key barriers to literacy learning.
“ SMU Guildhall bridges the gap between serious academic research and commercial video games. This environment has allowed our team to yield a product that brings together the creative, entertaining nature of games with the impactful literacy lessons being taught.”— Gary Brubaker, Director of SMU Guildhall
an ancient language. The player uses a‘ codex’ that was found in an attic to translate letters and words from the lost city into English pronunciation sounds, building phonemes and words to unlock secret locations inside major archeological sites around the world. Sites are based upon real world and mythical locations, such as Egypt and Atlantis.
After completing each location, a player will see the level transform with images of real locations. This helps keep users engaged in progressing further in the game, as it enables them to see and learn more about real world areas outside their current city. At each location, players are presented with new artifacts to decode. As the Codex translates each artifact, it helps the player understand the ancient language and unlock the next set of doors to progress in the game.
This project is an undertaking by People ForWords, a team composed of developers and researchers from SMU Guildhall, SMU Simmons School of Education and Human Development, and LIFT( Literacy Instruction For Texas). The pedagogical approach for the game supports research-based practices in literacy learning and game-based learning. All instructional elements are positioned in the context of the gameplay as learners solve challenges to solve mysteries of Atlantis, identifying letter sounds, CVC patterns, sight words, and eventually sentences.
The game begins with support in the form of guidance for the learner that decreases as they demonstrate mastery of basic literacy skills. Core gameplay revolves around crafting English phonemes, onset-rime patterns, and sight words to“ decode”
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