Gamifying Education

Senior project: LIVE

After much contemplation, agonizing, and practicing patience (aka: being divided into assigned teams) I ended up becoming part of the Language Immersion Virtual Environment (LIVE) project.

The final goal of our project: to design a virtual, AI-enhanced game environment for immersive language learning. After all, not many of us can experience actual immersion learning due to associated costs and risks of traveling to a foreign country just to learn a new language. Right now, I’m super excited to see what the final result of this will be. Just 9 months to go.

So far, we’ve worked on a design document where we defined functional requirements for our project and assigned each to a team member with more experience in that area. We have a barebones game down thanks to a skilled Unity-practicing team member and are working on the very complex Task Management System. I’m responsible for the localization aspect and making sure locations, NPC’s, players, and objects read with the target language while observing correct form.

I’ll keep y’all updated on how that goes.

Introduction

Hi all!

This is Zoha, a senior student at OSU majoring in CS with an applied option of Game Development. I’m from the Bay Area, and as is usual for we Bay-Areans, love the ocean. I could talk for hours about my experiences under the sea (scuba diving!) but this isn’t the blog for that.

What really got me into Computer Science was my personality of problem-solving. As a kid, I loved engaging in mental puzzles and math. Engineering may have been the obvious choice, but choosing a career-path was a big dilemma for me. I really wanted to do something meaningful for others and initially was set to become a doctor. After some more research, traveling, and soul-searching, I decided that the way I wanted to contribute to my world was by working for equitable access to information and education.

I transferred to OSU in 2022 and got my first job in software development starting 2024. Alongside, I’ve had the honor of being a TA at OSU for 3 quarters in Ethics in CS and Intro to Databases.

I’m really excited about the senior project we will be working on starting this quarter. Some of the projects I’m interested in, in order:

Prototype a web-based tool for creating and executing task-delineated, collaborative, AI-assisted assignments (basically an AI-enhanced LMS with task-delineation)
Language Immersion Virtual Environment (a world with foreign language speaking NPCs who you interact with to learn a new language)
Text Adventure Game for Education (interactive fiction to gamify school topics like History)
Gamification of PharmD classes. Create “Pharmacy Go” (game + database)
Escape Room Challenge (more for the experience of creating a game)

If you’re interested in working on/researching similar topics, send me an email at zoha.akbarzadeh@gmail.com. I’d love to connect!

Hey there :)

Here I’ll be talking about mainly about Game development and Learning Management Systems (LMS).
I might dabble more into the following topics in relation to the above:

Software for health: like health management systems, managing big data
AI and ML
Computer Graphics

If you’re reading this, it’s great to have you here!