Under the direction of HNU lecturers Prof. Michael Hebel, Prof. Guido Kühn and Sebastian de Andrade in collaboration with STEM representative StRin Christina Böhm and her colleague StR Ondrej Hilbert (both from Realschule Herrsching), 15 boys and six girls from Realschule Herrsching designed their own computer game in five days, from the idea to the finished program. Now the radio station Radio Oberland was a guest at the Realschule am Ammersee: The two tenth graders Johannes Weiß and Joschua Scholz answered questions from a reporter together with their teachers and reported on the development of educational games, which had been carried out in cooperation with the HNU.
One of the topics was the test play of NEXUS - an educational game that a group of HNU students had designed for chemistry lessons in ninth and tenth grade and which promotes a better understanding of redox reactions in a playful way. NEXUS breaks down the abstract processes to the essentials and then visualizes them in a new way - both as an analogue card game that revolves around oxidation numbers and in the form of a mobile app that deals with electron exchange and the composition of substances.
To create incentives to use the app, the HNU team also built in a mechanism that can be used to earn special cards, which in turn can be used in the card game. "It wasn't an easy task and it took us several attempts before we were able to develop the current version of NEXUS," explains student Wiebke Grubek. "But the hard work was more than worth it and our team is very proud of the final result. We hope that NEXUS will be able to help as many students as possible in chemistry lessons in the future." NEXUS has been nominated for the German Multimedia Award mb21; the award ceremony will take place on November 11 in Dresden.
Beta testing and the experiences from the five-day game design workshop, in which the students programmed small jump-and-run games themselves, were also discussed in the interview. The interview was broadcast on Radio Oberland on October 16. The interview can be listened to on the website of Realschule Herrsching: https://rs-herrsching.de/2023/10/19/die-rsh-bei-radio-oberland/.
