R

Animales! was the final project for the Design Psychology II class at Victoria University of Wellington.

This project explores how designers can implement psychology research into their creative process to create meaningful design outcomes.

In this case, Animales! is a card game to learn Spanish designed around psychology research about learning a foreign language. All the rules, mechanics and graphics of the game were carefully crafted based on concrete findings in psychology papers around language and effective learning.

Animales! premise is very simple, you challenge your friends to duels, betting that you can build a longer sentence in Spanish than your opponent. If you win, you steal your opponents coins; but if you lose, you might need to ask for help to other players.

All projects in this class had to be developed in only 6 weeks. The final prototype needed to be up to testing standards with real participants.

During its testing, Animales! showed to be a more time-efficient, engaging and motivating tool to learn Spanish compared to other digital platforms in the language learning market.

Some of the participants claimed that:

"Now I feel like I understand the structure of all sentences in Spanish" - Participant B

"I can't believe I am getting all of this right" - Participant B

"This is the first learning game that doesn't feel childish and actually gets you a great laugh" - Participant C