The ImparApp mobile game invites students to combine traditional attendance in the language classroom with exploration of the city of Coventry in a new and playful way! The game requires students to solve a time travel mystery by taking part in tasks that blend aspects of the physical environment with contextualised digital information supplied to them via mobile devices.

The ImparApp project involves work in partnernship between DMLL and Language Centre at CU. The development of the app has been tested with students ‘in the field’ in Spring Term 2016 and has received overwhelming positive responses by students. A future deployment of the ImparApp will take place during the university’s induction events in September 2016 to help new students familiarise themselves with the city of Coventry.

This work has been recently presented in LLAS Conference 2016 Frameworks for collaboration and multihlinquism at University of Warwick on 6-7 July (https://www.llas.ac.uk/) by Tiziana Cervi-Wilson and Billy Brick. Koula Charitonos, a researcher at DMLL, will present this work in the EUROCALL 2016 conference (http://eurocall2016.org/). Two papers drawing on this work will appear in conference proceedings in the coming months:

1. Morini, L., Charitonos, K., Arnab, S. et al., (2016) ImparApp: designing and piloting a game-based approach for language learning. Proceedings of ECGBL Conference 6-7 October 2016, Paisley, Scotland
2. Charitonos, K., Morini, L., Arnab, S., Cervi-Wilson, T. and Brick, B. (accepted) Urban Explorations for language learning: A gamified approach to teaching Italian in a university context. In Eurocall 2016, 24-27 August, Limassol