Siberian Federal University Scholar’s Innovation Brings Him A Grant

Alina Varlakhina, student of the School of Philology and Language Communication, SibFU, has presented a Media Literacy School computer game. She won How to Read Media contest and got 80 000 roubles grant for implementing her project.

Media Literacy School is a short story quest where players acquire basic knowledge in the field of digital etiquette. Players live one school day in a virtual Media Literacy School. The student must attend all classes, fulfill the proposed tasks and score as many points as possible. The game can be run in a browser or downloaded and opened on a PC. All tracks used in the game were created with the help AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist).

The project team included Arina Kuznetsova (designer and CG artist), student of the Linguistics Department, School of Philology and Language Communication, SibFU, and Sergey Simonenko (programmer), student of Reshetnev State Aerospace University, who helped to develop the game.

“The Media Literacy School was designed on the Unity platform and was originally for PC, but Sergey, our programmer, also made the game available online. The game is not without flaws — we still find inaccuracies, periodically improve and update something. I took on the role of a game designer, that is, a screenwriter and a producer of the game, but it seems to me that all the most difficult tasks were done by my team — the CG artist and the programmer,” shared Alina Varlakhina.

The Media Literacy School was designed as part of the student’s course paper titled The game as a media education tool: development and production experience. The scientific supervisor of the work is Daria Ustyuzhanina, senior lecturer at the Department of Journalism and Literary Studies, School of Philology and Language Communication, SibFU.