Die Wortinseln
Challenge:
Writing is a fundamental skill that combines cognitive and motor abilities. However, many learners struggle to stay motivated when practicing spelling and handwriting, as traditional exercises are often repetitive and uninspiring. By combining AI-driven storytelling, gamification, and physical writing using the STABILO LUNIS pen, this project explores a novel approach to make writing practice engaging, creative, and meaningful.
The goal of this semester challenge was to explore how the STABILO LUNIS pen, gamification, and AI can transform handwriting exercises for children aged 8–15 into an engaging experience.
Date: Summer semester 2026
Lecture: Designing Gamified Systems
Partner: STABILO International GmbH
Project results:
Die Wortinseln
Team: Lina Aichele, Berke Altinoluk, Sven Hitzel, Marie Winterbauer
Zusammenfassung:
Spelling exercises are often perceived as tedious by children, such as third-grade students, particularly when they involve repetitive worksheets. Gamification approaches based on points and leaderboards may even undermine children’s intrinsic motivation to write—an effect known as the overjustification effect (Deci, 1971). Our project, Die Wortinseln (The Word Islands), investigates how a theoretically grounded design based on Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) can motivate children to write voluntarily and enjoy the process without relying on external rewards.
Die Wortinseln is a gamified educational game designed to help primary school children develop their writing skills. It was developed as part of the Designing Gamified Systems course in collaboration with STABILO. In the game, a child gets lost at sea during a storm and, while trying to find their way home, arrives at a series of magical islands. The island inhabitants—including bees, a cooking bat, birds, and a crab—need help recovering from the storm. The player assists them by completing writing challenges using the STABILO LUNIS Inkpen.
Every design decision was derived from Self-Determination Theory and mapped using Morschheuser’s (2017) motivational affordance chain, which connects gamification elements to motivational affordances, psychological effects, behaviors, and gameful experiences. To preserve intrinsic motivation, we deliberately avoided point systems and leaderboards. Feedback was designed to be informational rather than controlling: a progress indicator and celebratory sounds foster a sense of competence without evaluating or comparing performance. The visual design also emphasizes encouragement rather than strictness, drawing on Solarski (2013) and Goethe (2019). Rounded, organic shapes convey friendliness, safety, and playfulness. The player journey follows Kim’s (2018) model of Discovery, Onboarding, Midgame, and Mastery.
Four scenes (Connection, Prologue, Journey, and Map) and four writing tasks with different formats (identifying objects, naming ingredients, writing words based on their number of syllables, and listening/writing comprehension) were implemented. The prototype was developed in Unity for Android tablets. It features a persistent Bluetooth connection to the LUNIS pen, a threaded producer-consumer architecture for stable data processing, a scene transition and progression system, and a locally hosted large language model (llama3.2:3b via Ollama) that generates context-sensitive narrative responses.
A playtest evaluation confirmed that the intrinsically motivated design approach was well received, and the findings informed the final refinements. Die Wortinseln demonstrates that a theoretically grounded design focused on intrinsic motivation can be realized through a coherent integration of narrative, aesthetics, and technology. It offers a promising approach to transforming writing exercises into experiences that feel more like an adventure than repetitive drills.
