Luden Learning Adventures

Within Southeast Asia, which boasts around 620 million inhabitants across 11 countries and consequently immense linguistic diversity, English is gradually acquiring the status of the most dominant language and is considered lingua franca. [Source]

As such, English language acquisition is considered a major part of the education system within Southeast Asia, and indeed one that carries with it prestigious connotations due to its status as the global language that allows for participation in the global discourse.

In Hong Kong specifically, where English is one of three official languages, English proficiency among Hong Kong youths aged 18-20 has shown a significant decline during the Covid-19 period of 2020-2022, in line with global trends, with the city now ranking fourth in Asia after Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia. [Source]

Yet, despite the growing importance of English language learning and soft skills development, rote memorization and an over-emphasis on speaking English “correctly” have led to fear of learning, while demographic shifts in the local population and teaching talent have led to decreased opportunities for exposure and practice for youths in Hong Kong.

Together with the learning gaps exacerbated by remote learning during the pandemic, as well as the rise of generative AI injecting technological and digital equity into the equation, the state of English language education in Hong Kong is alarming and has become a top priority to address. While not as pronounced as in Hong Kong, a similar urgency faces the entire continent as it continues its rapid development.

Luden Learning Adventures is a suite of 16 facilitated, game-based curriculums across three age groups, whose development began in 2020. Set in the world of Luden, a fictional fantasy universe akin to the Wizarding World and Middle-Earth created by Press Start Academy, these adventures mirror classic edutainment games by placing students as the protagonists, overcoming challenges, meeting other characters, moving through different levels, tackling different game mechanics, and influencing the development of the storylines, as they learn and apply skills in English language and other standards-aligned learning outcomes, and develop 21st-century soft skills.

Programs are designed episodically with creative titles (e.g. “Trial by Fire” as our debate curriculum; “Eon Expedition” for generative AI; “The Forbidden Forests” for beginner English acquisition; “The Throne of Storms” for advanced creative writing) that signal immersion and fun to the “player” (we refer to our students as players). Depending on the age group, the settings (fictional location within Luden), non-player characters (recurring characters), narratives (quests assigned to players), and game mechanics (linear storytelling, choose-your-own-adventure, puzzles, games, etc.) are different, to allow for variation in learning experience, scaling of complexity against age level, and skill development outcomes. Here are two example videos walking through Trial by Fire and Eon Expedition.

Developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, these programs are built using presentation slide software such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides, to ensure that digital prerequisites, and access to personal digital devices for learners, would not be a limiting factor for access to quality education despite being run remotely. All an instructor needs to do is to load up the slides and understand how to facilitate the session – something that the accompanying lesson plans go in-depth into – and distribute physical assets such as the accompanying Quest Journals and simple dice – and the structure and standardization built into the narratives and materials ensure that the quality of teaching and learning does not vary greatly across different learning contexts. This is why all Luden Learning Adventures have continued to thrive in the classroom in this post-covid period – because they were designed to be outcome-driven with a learning experience in mind, rather than confined to any platform.

Learning takes place through practice linked to the adventure, and in the form of analogue and digital Quest Journals. These are documents with exercises and prompts aligned with international curriculum standards such as the International Baccalaureate and the Common Core, and linked to the stories – so writing exercises are, for example, to log how a character successfully navigated a tricky negotiation or boss fight by using a particular part of speech, to “hide” the learning and application beneath the fun. Development takes place via different game mechanics, selected to create opportunities for players to exhibit and practice a particular 21st-century soft skill: Successfully overcoming a boss fight could, for example, require players to communicate, collaborate, and lead, while the fight itself would need critical and computational thinking.

The Luden Learning Adventures were originally developed for underserved children in Hong Kong during the Covid-19 pandemic, to allow us to deliver high-quality English education at scale without the need to worry about access to digital devices during remote learning.

We had always focused on analogue, game-based learning experiences in the classroom, but we realized, when it became clear that the pandemic would be here to stay, that we had to quickly pivot our approach in order to not leave any learner behind. Many students were left behind during the remote learning period because they didn’t have the laptops and tablets at home that many solutions required, but many teachers and schools were also left behind because their schools were not equipped with the resources to support remote learning.

Many other education providers and schools moved in one of these two ways: 1) Create asynchronous online learning content via their own apps and software; 2) Continue to deliver their standard, rote memorization-based tutorials and lectures via Zoom, to unengaged online classrooms of 40 or more students. Both exacerbated digital inequity and made learning even less fun.

By adapting our analogue learning experiences into immersive, interactive, Slide-based learning adventures, and mailing learning packs including physical copies of our Quest Journals, dice, and other assets directly to our learners, we were able to design for the lowest level of access – all our learners needed was to be able to dial into Zoom – while not compromising the quality of the learning experience – all other factors would be the same as our classroom experiences. Learners of all ages would be able to dive into our fictional world, collaborate with their peers, and learn and apply writing and speaking techniques, all while under the guidance and supervision of a trained teacher (members of our instructional team at the beginning; teachers at our partner schools as it scaled).

We were able to serve 1,000+ students remotely during the pandemic, with online programs with our school partners; holiday camps while students were stuck indoors; and, most importantly, regular pro-bono and subsidized programs for community centers and underserved children. As a result of the amazing feedback from our students and partners, we were also hired for consultancy engagements with prominent NGOs and schools to help develop and adapt their curriculum for remote learning, and began partnering with schools outside Hong Kong to deliver programs online, reaching Mainland China, Singapore, the Philippines, and more.

In the post-pandemic era (which Hong Kong entered much later than most of the world), the learnings we took and applied to developing Luden Learning Adventures are continuing to serve us well in instructional design in general, which has led us to developing and leading well-received professional development programs in learning experience design. Our hybrid programs also work effectively across mediums, which has allowed us to continue delivering them both in-person and virtually. And we continue to empower underserved children, teachers and schools with these adventures – and new ones being developed. 

My passion for education started when I was in high school, volunteering during three summers at an NGO in Hong Kong, designing and leading English immersion camps for local underserved youths. It was there that I first combined my love for stories, adventures, and games with learning outcomes, and that I first learned the key to education was to build for learner agency.

Since then, while I never studied education or game design formally, and I’d never done either in my professional life prior to starting Press Start Academy, I’ve always remained close to education and learning design, whether it was in college when I volunteered to teach English to refugees in inner-city Boston, or at my first banking job, where my cursory experience creating lesson plans and speaking in front of a small room led me to lead staff townhalls and communication campaigns, or in my subsequent consulting career, where I led design workshops and built interactive activities for specific outcomes, not only for corporate clients but also for our university partners and NGO beneficiaries.

Press Start Academy was founded to address inequity in education, to empower all learners regardless of background, and to help children fall in love with learning. In the past four years, as a result of growing up with the pandemic, we’ve been able to hone our learning experience design chops while serving the beneficiaries I’ve felt connected to from all those years ago, through our innovative and bottom-up approach to learning through play. We believe that designing for the lowest common denominator, access-wise, allows us to create the most scalable learning experiences – as such, the vision, process, and approach should always take precedence over the technology with which to deliver it.

We have had the privilege of working closely with our users and beneficiaries to understand their learning and teaching needs across mediums, as well as experiencing it first-hand especially during the pandemic when we were also in the trenches designing and delivering programs ourselves. This is why all of our Luden Learning Adventures don’t just come with the Slide-based adventures and learning materials, but also with comprehensive lesson plans and instructional packets – they are designed first and foremost to be facilitated and delivered by educators easily with minimal preparation and technical setup, to achieve learning outcomes aligned with international standards with maximal fun and interaction.

And I am fortunate to have a team who has ample experience with underserved communities, learning experience design, and game design. Our Learning Experience lead has 8+ years of experience in the classroom, and first got his start teaching underserved children and teachers in Mainland China. Our Product and Strategy Leads hold Masters in Education degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of Hong Kong respectively, specializing in education technology and gamification, and working closely with the local communities in both locations. And we all love games, working with kids, and empowering teachers! 

We have built 16 programs within the Luden Learning Adventures series, all of which have been run as classroom experiences in various capacities (in-school learning projects, after-school clubs and programs, extracurricular activities, holiday camps) in 20+ schools in Hong Kong and beyond.

All Luden Learning Adventures have fully developed learning packs, including Quest Journals and other materials, for students, as well as lesson plans and curriculum guides for teachers.

These programs span the age of 6 to 14, with subject focuses in creative writing, storytelling, debate, humanities, generative AI, and skill focuses in creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, citizenship, and character. They are aligned with and have been used in International Baccalaureate curriculums, and have been customized to fit the Hong Kong public curriculum and the Common Core standards.

Our pandemic-era online programs reached over 1,000 students in 3 countries, while our offline programs since then (and intermittently during the pandemic) have reached another 1,000 students. Our professional development offerings, including workshops, talks, seminars, and symposiums on instructional design, gamification, technology in the classroom, and generative AI, have been delivered in 7 countries and reached over 1,000 educators globally.

After three years in prototype and initial pilot in Hong Kong, and one year of further market testing and validation through conferences and popup events in Singapore, the Philippines, Mainland China, Australia, and the United States, we’re ready to go global!

It’s been a challenging few years of design, development and deployment for our local context in Hong Kong – the pandemic was stressful to navigate, but gave us epiphanies and learnings on what it means to design powerful learning experiences and to deliver to underserved communities. With recurring institutional, school and NGO clients under our belt, we have now expanded our reach to the Southeast Asia region, and are beginning to understand the challenges faced by educators and learners in different contexts.

We’ve been fortunate to deliver Luden Learning Adventures online to learners outside of Hong Kong during the pandemic, and over the past year we’ve also taken both our student and teacher work on the road, speaking in cities like Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, Melbourne, Boston, New York City, and Beijing, and at institutions and occasions such as the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Columbia University Teachers College, ACMI (Australian Center for the Moving Image), Games for Change, 21st Century Learning, and more.

The Luden Learning Adventures are inspired by universal principles such as learning through play and student agency, aligned with international curriculum standards, and built for the development of 21st-century soft skills through games. Based on the feedback we’ve received from our learner and educator audiences across the world, we’re excited to take our approach global, and we look forward to setting up innovative global partnerships, impactful local distribution and training networks, and of course, access to talent and capital.

I grew up on classic edutainment games published by the likes of Humongous Entertainment and The Learning Company; on educational series such as the Magic School Bus and Captain Planet; and with the privilege of having English teachers and tutors who personalized their teaching to my interests, passions, and strengths.

Luden Learning Adventures was developed to be a hybrid of all three: A fun, interactive, educational experience with an exciting narrative and immersive setting, while being able to collaborate and solve challenges together with peers under the guidance and facilitation of an instructor, who is also able to iterate and adapt to the students’ learning on the fly.

And that’s just from the perspective of both the learner and the educator.

From the perspective of the designer and developer, with the advent of modern software and technology, Luden Learning Adventures is a showcase that not all amazing educational experiences need to be built on sophisticated technology; just simple Slide-based programs will suffice, as long as the process underlying the development is robust and visionary enough.

What makes our solution innovative is its simplicity: Through some of our professional development workshops, we train teachers to develop classroom experiences like Luden Learning Adventures, and we are so proud to see that more and more teachers are able to bring an approach like this to their students in their own classrooms. This simple idea that “you can build it too” helps simplify our vision and offering, and we are excited to see this approach continue to scale.

At Press Start Academy, there are two core beliefs and frameworks that drive everything we do.

Teacher agency is a prerequisite to student agency.

Schools and teachers are taken for granted too often these days. We hear statements like “Kids don’t learn in school” and “School is broken”, yet education entrepreneurs rarely focus on working with the education system; instead, many advocate for alternative education pathways. Unfortunately, while these pathways may be impactful and innovative, they do not solve the inequity problem inherent and rife in education, for as long as inequality exists, mainstream schooling will always exist, and underserved communities will always bear the brunt of the inequity. Education is an equity issue after all.

So we believe in working with change agents within the education system, and teachers are the most important change agents of all. All our learning experiences are designed for teachers to be able to plug and play, which is why all the Luden Learning Adventures come with comprehensive lesson plans, easily navigable Slides, and simple, physical learning materials. The most meaningful feedback we routinely get from our teacher partners and school clients is, “Thank you for this in-depth lesson plan.” I think of our instructor team as merely the guinea pigs who give our curriculums their test runs; the real impact and scale happens when teachers can use the Luden Learning Adventures in their own classroom (and, increasingly, develop their own content).

Process-Tools-Delivery, our approach to learning experience design.

When it comes to education innovation, the focus is too often on the technology and the tools. We obsess over the latest edtech tools, shiny features, and fancy buzzwords, yet we routinely forget that these are tools that are meant to support our vision for teaching and learning. This is why our focus is always on Process – to identify what we want our learners to get out of their experience, to design experiences that empower them, to create environments that they fall in love with and get excited by. We draw inspirations from project-based and inquiry-based learning, gamification and game design, and creative writing and multimedia production.

Only then should we decide which Tools we use to execute on our vision. Tools can be edtech solutions and LMS’s; in our case, they are different game mechanics, storytelling techniques, plot points and character development that are used intentionally to lead to specific skill development opportunities or learning outcomes. Finally, an evolution in Process and Tools requires an evolution in Delivery as well: If the classroom is built to be fun, and learning is built to be participatory and curious, then the role of the instructor must also be facilitative, open, and engaging.

We are currently validating our approach and vision via comprehensive research studies with our university partners: the efficacy and impact of games as educational tools with the University of Hong Kong and the Singapore Institute of Technology, and the role of technology in creativity and learning with the City University of Hong Kong.

Broadly, our solution aligns strongly with Targets 4.1, 4.4, 4.6, and 4.c within the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Our learning outcomes mostly revolve around reading and writing proficiency (and English language acquisition and practice in general), with select programs developed to foster AI and digital literacy, entrepreneurship, and game design; all programs are aligned with international curriculum standards, and all lesson plans are written to create opportunities for observation, development and application of the 6C’s of 21st-century skills – creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, citizenship, and character.

By working with children and schools across the socioeconomic spectrum, ranging from underserved community schools and centers, to local public schools, to private international schools, we aim to provide high-quality education that is technology- and platform-agnostic, meaning that the classroom experience and level of instruction is consistent regardless of the audience, and that a lack of access to devices and digital technology was not detrimental to learning, especially during the pandemic.

We firmly believe that empowering all teachers is an essential part of the solution to empowering all learners, which is why over the past year, having emerged from the pandemic with a successful track record, we have started delivering professional development programs to educators across the world, around topics such as instructional design, designing for student agency, generative AI policy and strategies for the classroom, design thinking and STEAM education, facilitation and storytelling, and hybrid learning design.

All of our programs have a comprehensive lesson plan underlying them, with specific learning outcomes and skill development goals being the focus of what our instructors track. These are consolidated into qualitative observations sent to our students, as well as their parents and teachers, to provide a clear picture and reflection of their strengths and areas for improvement, and across their learner lifetime with us we are then able to measure quantitatively their overall development. In addition, our students, parents, and teachers are often asked to share their feedback with us on their learning experience – we are proud to continuously receive resoundingly positive feedback across multiple areas, such as fun, engagement, learning, inspiration, and capacity building.

The Luden Learning Adventures are currently Slide-based programs built on widely accessible software such as Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint, to ensure that they can be adopted and used by teachers and schools at scale without worry of access and paywall, so they could be run with minimal technical requirements during the pandemic remote learning period.

We utilize various tools to develop our curriculums and learning assets, including but not limited to the Adobe Creative Suite, Canva, the Microsoft Suite, the Google Suite, and generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. During the pandemic period, the Luden Learning Adventures were run virtually as online programs through Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.

We are currently working on the next phase of our product development, to create independent, interactive edutainment games based on these programs, in the form of physical media (e.g. board and card games, books etc.) as well as mobile and digital games. This will be the next big leap forward for our offering, and one that we will be leveraging digital technology extensively for.

Full-time staff: 7

Interns (currently): 8

Approximately 4 years - since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020

I am a solo founder and Hong Kong native educated in the United States. We currently have three functional leaders: Our Learning Experience Lead Logan Stratman, who oversees all curriculum and learning experience design, is a United States native with extensive teaching experience in Hong Kong and Mainland China; our Ecosystems Lead Zahra Sadiq, who oversees partnerships and marketing, is a Pakistan native with international exposure in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong; and our Product Lead, who is leading our commercialization and productization efforts, is a Chinese native with international education in the United States and Hong Kong, and now divides her time between Germany and Hong Kong.

With experience in international education and global leadership programs myself, I strive to cultivate a team environment that is supportive, inclusive and innovative. While local language (Cantonese) fluency is important in some of our day-to-day work such as marketing, business development and classroom instruction, our working language is English, and our work culture has seen interns of various nationalities join our ranks over the past few years. I am proud to have worked with student interns from the Philippines, Nepal, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the United States and the United Kingdom, in addition to our native Hong Kong, most of whom have extended their contracts beyond their initial periods.

I look forward to continuing to champion diversity, equity and inclusion in both our hiring and team-building practices, as well as of course the work that we do with learners and educators on a daily basis.

Currently, we operate mostly under a B2B2C model. Our school partnerships, which constitute our biggest recurring revenue, take the form of in-school learning projects, after-school clubs and programs, extracurricular activities, and holiday camps. Depending on the format, we either sell programs to schools in bulk (say for a whole grade to embark on a special project week), or schools upsell our programs to parents (say for semester-long after-school programs and/or summer camps).

During school holidays such as summer, Christmas, Lunar New Year and Easter, we also run small-scale camps as B2C offerings. These are sold by individual enrollment to parents and students, who attend these camps at our studio. We are proud to boast a high number of recurring customers, in the form of both our regular school clients and our returning students and parents.

The same B2B2C and B2C models exist for our professional development programs, which either take the form of whole-school PD Days and special workshops, or open-to-public teacher training workshops and cohorts.

The Luden Learning Adventures are the foundation for all the work that we do: For student-facing programs, these are the classroom experiences that we have developed and that our instructor team delivers onsite; for teacher-facing programs, all aspects (instructional design; technology and generative AI in lesson planning, teaching and learning; and storytelling and facilitation skills) use Luden as the basis and as real case studies.

With this pilot phase now maturing, our next step is to create new revenue channels through the selling of the Luden Learning Adventures curriculums (via stronger standards alignment and creating a licensing model), as well as the productization of the Luden Learning Adventures (going from live, facilitated curriculums to personalized learning adventures in both analogue and digital formats).

From inception till now, we have not taken on any external funding. This has been an entirely bootstrapped endeavor that has coincided with an extremely challenging pandemic, but with our internal processes and design approach now solidified, our quality and impact now becoming established and known, and our thought leadership and presence now reaching international audiences and landing us on the global conference circuit, we feel we are ready to take Luden Learning Adventures to the next level.

We have a dedicated network of school clients, an enthusiastic community of teacher partners, and a passionate and growing group of devoted students and parents to thank for our growth and revenue, which has amounted to just under USD 1 million within the past four years, the vast majority of which has been spent on our studio and our growing team. To supplement our revenue, a portion of our team’s time is reserved to take on curriculum design projects with corporate and institutional clients. These are service-based consultancy and design contracts that typically last around 4-6 months each. We have worked on more than 10 such projects, each valued at USD15,000 to USD50,000

I am humbled to leverage the reach of international communities and leadership networks that I am proud to be a part of, including the Obama Foundation APAC Leaders, the Tatler Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow, and the World Economic Forum Global Shapers, as well as other pro bono board positions such as Games for Change APAC and the University of Hong Kong Common Core, to expand our reach. As a result of these connections, I have been able to form partnerships and collaborations that have enabled me to bring the Luden Learning Adventures and our work to Mainland China, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and the United States, and I look forward to deepening our connections and establishing our presence in more regions and locations in the months and years to come. The teacher communities we are building globally through our professional development programs, which are much easier to take on the road as compared to our classroom experiences, will bode well as we embark on the development of Luden Learning Adventures as a product.