Curio project launches educational game designed to stimulate curiosity and learning

The Institute of Digital Games – University of Malta is proud to announce the official launch of Curio, a free, educational toolkit, empowering teachers with an interactive virtual world that encourages learning through playful discovery.

Curio was developed for inclass use (via a Local Area Network) to foster curious attitudes towards scientific themes and ideas with a specific focus on primary school students (ages 8-11). Students can play Curio in teams, on the Local Area Network of their computer lab at school! The project and its attending research were led by Prof. Stefano Gualeni and was funded by Erasmus+.

The Curio toolkit allows for the creation of new experiences and scenarios that teachers can easily author and use in their classes. Through digital interactions with its virtual world, Curio stimulates creative problem-solving and a more positive attitude towards scientific inquiry and scientific discovery by appealing to the innate sense of curiosity that characterises human beings.

The project was piloted before the pandemic struck in 2020. Teachers were enthusiastic about the tool and a science teacher in the Italian school where it was piloted remarked that “Curio allows children to ask and share questions with classmates through the networked computer, facilitating the process of posing problems. [...] Students found Curio immersive, exciting, engaging – they wanted to play and play again. The experience of playing – the physical interaction, the reward, the visible progress and achievement – made them feel immersed and fully engaged”.

The Curio project seeks to integrate traditional teaching curricula with digital learning experiences that, in addition to transferring usable notions, will also provide a supervised, cognitive training ground for acquiring and structuring notions themselves.

When playing Curio, the students’ goal is that of restoring curiosity to a fictional galaxy that has been invaded by the Haze of Confusion. The Haze extends its tendrils across the galaxy, draining the planets’ inhabitants of their enthusiasm for learning. Students play individually, but are sorted into three teams (blue, red and yellow).

The toolkit, instruction manuals and didactic material can all be freely downloaded via www.curioproject.eu. A trailer video is available on: http://curioproject.eu/curio

The Institute of Digital Games – University of Malta

As one of the top-ranked postgraduate programmes in game design, the Institute of Digital Games competes with established research powerhouses such as MIT and frequent research partner NYU. Currently the Institute is also working on using AI and games for education in their LearnML Erasmus project as well as their Com-N-Play Science project.

The CURIO Team:

Game design and development: Marcello A. Gómez-Maureira (PHI) and Isabelle Kniestedt (PHI)

Game design consultancy and project coordination: Prof. Stefano Gualeni (UM)

Game art: Rebecca Portelli and Suus de Kock

Partners at the University of Malta: Prof. André Xuereb, Prof. Sandra Dingli and Danielle Farrugia

University of Malta – Placeholder Interactive (PHI)