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Information Systems, Games and Gamification

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  9. Norra's Escape

Norra's Escape

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:

Norra's Escape

Team: Akhila Pavithran, Malavika Sindhupriya

Zusammenfassung:

Norra's Escape is an educational escape-room adventure game, created to make handwriting practice fun and enjoyable for children aged 8–10 years. Traditional handwriting exercises are often repetitive and difficult to sustain to keep children’s interest and motivation. Norra's Escape tackles this challenge by combining gamification with artificial intelligence and digital handwriting recognition to turn traditional writing exercises into an immersive story-based learning experience. Children write on paper with a STABILO digital pen instead of typing or touching a touchscreen and the STABILO Kathy Handwriting Recognition SDK captures and recognizes their handwriting in real time. This allows real pen-and-paper writing to be incorporated into gameplay, while still providing the educational benefits of traditional handwriting practice. The game follows the journey of Norra, a curious fox who gets trapped inside a school at night and needs to find her way home before sunrise. Norra accompanies the player during the adventure, offering words of encouragement, hints and helps in story progression. Her dialogue is produced dynamically with the Groq Llama 3.3 large language model, and delivered through Android text-to-speech, enabling adaptive, natural, and non-repetitive interactions which foster engagement and immersion. Norra's Escape offers five themed escape rooms, each designed to test different literacy and cognitive skills. In The Dark Classroom children restore color to hidden books by writing the name of the right color. The Memory Room improves memory and vocabulary by requiring players to remember and write down the names of animals that are shown briefly. The Science Lab introduces simple science concepts in one-word riddles, answered with handwriting. In Dancing Books Norra collects letters that have fallen apart and the players find and write the whole word. Finally, The Way Out challenges players to guide Norra safely to the exit and complete the adventure. The game uses kid-friendly mechanics to help keep players motivated in order to avoid frustration: a lives system, second-chance timers, pen-shake gestures for contextual hints, interactive door-breaking actions, and continuous AI- driven feedback are all important aspects of the game. Feedback is designed to celebrate progress and gently guide players, with no direct answers given. When a child finishes a story, they are given a personalized illustrated story made from the words they spelled correctly, a meaningful reward that reinforces learning.

Technically, Norra's Escape is developed in Unity using C# for the Android platform, integrating the STABILO Kathy SDK for pen connectivity, stroke capture, gesture recognition, and handwriting recognition alongside cloud-based AI narration and on- device text-to-speech synthesis. Norra's Escape turns the mundane activity of practicing handwriting into an enjoyable, stimulating and purposeful educational experience that supports the development of literacy skills while inspiring confidence, curiosity and perseverance among young learners.

Further details, source code and documentation:
github.com/akhila-tech12/NorraEscapeF