ycombinator: Pitch

Hi, I see you guys are interested in making an MMORPG language learning game. It's a great idea. In fact, it's an idea that my brother, myself and a few other guys have been working on the past four years, ever since I graduated from Ohio State with my Master's in Foreign Language Education. We have already seen it work in our very alpha, alpha testing of some rough prototypes with high school Spanish students in our area.

To test the concept, we focused on just a few language concepts (teaching personal, descriptive adjective pairs, e.g. "tall/short; old/young", etc.) and set up an ambush scenario of the player by some orcs fitting the description. Then, we paired the player with a helper avatar. The avatar and the player each shot a different orc in every attacking pair. The avatar told the player which to target.

Second, we set up a castle maze, through which the player has to navigate as a spy, picking up needed ingredients for a weaponized spell along the way. The avatar helper already knows the lay of the castle. He instructs the player where he has to go to avoid detection.

We tested these two and a third game in a few area high schools last spring just before school let out. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The kids dubbed our one game the "Spanish flappy bird", because of how addictive it was.

While we'd like to develop more apps, eventually putting together an entire year's worth of curriculum for teachers, we need to redirect our focus to building an extensible framework and community to step up the development from what only a handful of people could otherwise produce.

I'm a teacher. I know state standards, which do work. I also know that a lot of the textbooks, etc. we use in schools to teach are not effective and, quite frankly, boring. Standards are good for accountability. Games are good for engagement.

So we're linking the two. We are building a framework which tracks a language learner's (not just high school; anyone's) progress through a given game and determines where he is in mastering all of the standards and, by extension, the language. The framework plots out his game experience, directing him to this or that "mission"/app targeting the concomitant standard based on his strengths and weaknesses.

The framework itself is open-sourced and built by a community of developers. This is where we need your help. Once it's fully operational, we open up the game development to both for and not-for-profit groups who are willing to create their games in accordance with state standards. That way our framework acts as a kind of clearinghouse. Teachers and the general public know that what is published in our community actually educates in addition to entertaining. Developers can work on a project as small-scale as just a particular vocabulary set or grammar concept. Or they can go whole hog and make a full-scale, MMORPG for an entire, say, year's worth of language instruction. Or anywhere in between. What unifies them is a common set of standards and a common performance database so that users, regardless of where they start or what they do, know a.) where they are in acquiring the language and b.) what games/missions, etc. will take them to the next level.

Another way of thinking about this framework from the user's experience is like Marvel's comics universe of characters and worlds.

We would like to kick this off with a forum and see where to go from there, who wants to develop what. You can find us at http://www.parthalan.com/forums/forum/parthalan-development-...