Latin and Game Design: Project Nicolai Klimii

Latin and programming seem like opposites that you wouldn't immediately use in the same context. This game project, which is a collaboration between the Educational Master UGent and the Sint-Lievenscollege, proves the opposite. We hope to bring these two worlds closer together by designing a game in which students try to complete some levels with their knowledge of Latin.

The background of the game is the eighteenth century story of Ludvig Holberg, Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum. The story features Nicola's imaginative encounters with crazy creatures, which also heightens the visual aspect of the game. While playing, students are given a booklet with all kinds of exercises about the repetition of the separate ablative. At the end of the game, they should be able to: recognize a separate ablative in a sentence, name the correct temporal relationship, correctly translate this separate ablative and solve substantive comprehension questions about the text.