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CASLS is proud to announce an exciting new project to engage learners in academic residential communities — ECOPOD. Using ARIS, a development platform for mobile delivery, ECOPOD  brings together both technical expertise and an immersive language environment to produce a game that pushes second language learners to interact with each other and their environment. Through a choose your own adventure style of game play, learners must complete a series of community objectives to increase and maintain the health of their pod. This can be done through social collaboration, place-based scavenger hunts, and problem-based tasks designed to connect academic

In one community objective, tied to the UO Common Reading, players must survive a global pandemic in both their local context and in a location where the target language is spoken. Players must think and act in their target language in order to escape death from the pandemic.

Benefits of ECOPOD do not come strictly from the pragmatic excitement elicited in trying to survive a pandemic or increase the health of one’s pod, rather, it exists in the interactions between the players and their environment, as well as solving complex, real-world problems. Players must physically go to certain locations in order to pick up items, prompt the next part in the game, and survive, all the while competing and trading with other players for game resources.

ECOPOD is the newest addition to the bourgeoning field of placed-based language learning. ECOPOD will be available in English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Japanese, and German with activities linked to the University of Oregon campus; the goal is for students to play in their target language. In doing so, players reinforce their language skills in order to successfully navigate the multilingual world of a pandemic. This adds to the currently existing body of work in this area, accompanying projects such as Mentira and Chrono Ops at Portland State University. For additional projects see pebll.uoregon.edu.

The U.S. Department of Education, under grant #P229A14004, supports development of this project. Contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education nor imply endorsement by the federal government. Sponsorship is also provided by the University of Oregon Division of Undergraduate Studies, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the Office of International Affairs.