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Runesinger     (0 comments)

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Age Range Ages 7 and up

Brief Description

Play with Korean. Feed a village. Practice a few nouns and verbs by serving food to villagers during a famine in North Korea. Each villager sings the food they need. Compose the letters into a magic word. Play in virtual environment and user interface that embody Hangul.

Release Date May 2009

Developer Ethan Kennerly et al.

Project Lead Ethan Kennerly

Press Coverage

Press Release URL


Full Description

Runesinger is a demo of a PC videogame to speak and spell Korean.  The player practices a few nouns and verbs by serving food to hungry villagers during a North Korean famine.

Inspired by melodic intonation therapy, the player sings a jingle.  On each musical note, a ball bounces on an iconic syllable.  Through a spelling puzzle, the player composes each syllable in Hangul, which is the phonetic alphabet of Korean.  Subsequently, the player sings with Korean subtitles.

The three-dimensional virtual environment, user interface, and story embody the rules of Hangul.  Thus, Runesinger harnesses tropes of videogames to practice a foreign language in a meaningful context.



Purpose

Learn a foreign language

Metrics
 How are you measuring results?
 Pretest and posttest in Korean. Survey of story of the game.

What outcomes have been measured?
 Excellent pronunciation of Korean. Recognition of words and spelling. Awareness that North Korean villages have suffered severe famines since 1997.


Funding Sources: Out of pocket

Sponsors/In-kind donations: Andrea Chang composed original music

Budget
Overall: 30,000

Social Issues/Channels Poverty, Other Game Tags

serious game, Korean, same language subtitling, task-based language teaching, assessment-driven design, 한글, Hangul, North Korea, famine



Where you can play this game http://runesinger.com Download the 20-minute experiment and fill out the 10-minute survey. Contact Ethan to participate in the experiment: kennerly@finegamedesign.com

Contacts
General Ethan Kennerly, kennerly@finegamedesign.com
Press Ethan Kennerly, kennerly@finegamedesign.com

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