Newby Chinese is a gamified system for learning Mandarin Chinese in a fun way, initially in a supervised classroom environment. I have been working on this with my friend and project collaborator Richard McCurry since 2016, and Richard’s core concept (which was always very engaging) has, in the last 9 months or so, really fleshed out and taken shape as a set of minigames and challenges tied together into competitive multiplayer races. Our first customer (a secondary school) starts using Newby Chinese in a couple of weeks time.
Last week we presented a paper at an academic conference – IEEE Games, Entertainment & Media. This included a demo of some of the interactive multiplayer minigames which make up our learning system. It went really well, and the 20 or so participants found it very engaging. My heavily-cached Ajax-and-Websockets NodeJs server performed exactly as I had hoped.
For more details and discussion you can download our full IEEE GEM conference paper here.
You can try a demo of Newby Chinese here.
The main Newby Chinese website is here.
