Discover eLearning are delighted to announce that one of our recent projects has been nominated for a prestigious Learning Technologies Award.
Alice in Typhoidland, an exhibition created in collaboration with the University of Oxford, has been nominated for the Best Learning Game category at the upcoming 2020 awards.
The exhibition explored the history of typhoid in Oxford – a bacterial infection that blighted the population until the 1800s when new research ensured that it became a preventable disease.
Discover eLearning were drafted in to create the interactive elements of the exhibition. Amongst the exhibits designed were touch screen interactive games available to play in the university’s Weston Library venue.
The games were located in the main hallway on large display cabinets, along with an interactive map that detailed the spread of typhoid and the measures taken to control it between the years 1872 and 1901.
The games designed included the Mad Hatter Pipe Challenge, a puzzle game challenging visitors to fix the Mad Hatter’s plumbing so he can host a sanitary tea party and prevent his guests contracting typhoid.
The Dean Liddell River Challenge saw players attempting to help Alice’s father improve Oxford’s drinking water by placing drinking fountains and cesspools in strategic places around the city.
Alice in Typhoidland was required to be as accessible to as many people as possible, and so was built around several talks, games, animations and interactive exhibits.
The shortlisting follows two nominations for Discover eLearning at last year’s Learning Technologies Awards, for Excellence in the Design of Learning Content (public and non-profit sector) and Best Online Distance Learning Programme alongside Middlesbrough College.
Discover eLearning’s founder and director Chris Hodgson attended the black tie awards ceremony last November, where he was named runner-up in both categories.
The Learning Technologies Awards is recognised as the most prestigious awards scheme in the industry, largely due to the independent judging process.
Led and co-ordinated by the eLearning Network, it is seen as being especially credible due to the team of judges being drawn from leading professionals rather than from the organisers themselves.
Chris Hodgson said: “I couldn’t be more pleased to have been nominated for this project. I’m especially proud of the work we put into making the Alice in Typhoidland games both fun and informative, and it appears the judges have so far agreed that we’ve done a fine job.
“I’d also like to say what an honour it was working alongside the iconic institution of the University of Oxford. In recent months we’ve seen that they’ve been working incredibly hard to find a vaccine for Covid-19; the Typhoidland exhibition shows that they were striving to improve the health of the public in Victorian times, and they’re still doing so now.
“To be nominated for an award two years in a row shows we’re definitely on the right track, and I’ll do all I can to keep this run going!”
Alice in Typhoidland ran at the Weston Library at the University of Oxford until 22nd March and the History of Science Museum until 26th July.
It will move to the Museum of Oxford in Winter 2020, before going on tour to Atlanta, Georgia in January 2021.
Learn more about the exhibition at https://typhoidland.org/.
