Dungeon

The Dungeon is a multifaceted project for the gamification of educational content.

You can find an interesting report on our project in the news section of Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (04 April 2024, in German).

For more information about the PRODUS project, please visit our project page on the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences website.

Requirements

Java SE Development Kit 21 LTS installed.

Known Limitations

Currently the path to the project files cannot contain any spaces, special characters or umlauts.

This project is intended as supplementary teaching material for German-language university courses and is therefore aimed at German-speaking students. If you have any questions, problems or suggestions, please feel free to contact us in English or German.

Funding

It is acknowledged that parts of the materials contained in this repository have been developed as part of various publicly funded projects.

Lehr-Escape-Rooms mit LowCode im Dungeon (LROD)

04/2025 - 03/2027, 3003-1271, Freiraum 2025, Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre

This project builds upon the goals and insights of the earlier "Dungeon: Learning by Questing" initiative. It aims to combine playful engagement with meaningful educational experiences by using the Dungeon framework to design and implement didactic escape rooms.

In these digital escape rooms, students must collaborate to solve subject-related puzzles in order to progress through the game. The approach fosters teamwork, critical thinking, and applied understanding of academic content in an interactive game environment. To support this, the Dungeon framework is being extended with remote multiplayer capabilities, allowing multiple students to participate in a shared escape room experience from different locations. Additionally, a low-code approach is being developed to enable educators - even those without programming experience - to easily design and create their own escape rooms. This makes the concept accessible and adaptable for a wide range of teaching contexts.

Programming Dungeon Adventures at School (PRODUS)

12/2024 - 08/2026, EFRE-20300105, Pakt für Informatik 2.0, EFRE/JTF NRW 2021--27

The project aims to promote interest in STEM subjects - especially computer science - among school students in the surrounding region. The primary goal is to inspire young learners to consider a future path in computer science by engaging them in hands-on, game-based learning experiences.

To this end, a series of programming workshops were designed, all based on the Dungeon framework and grounded in the principles of game-based learning. Each workshop is tailored to different experience levels:

• Workshop 1: Blockly-Dungeon

  This no-code workshop is designed for younger pupils with little to no prior programming experience. Using Google's Blockly language, pupils guide a hero through various levels of a dungeon. Along the way, they solve puzzles that gradually increase in complexity, introducing programming concepts such as loops and boolean expressions in an intuitive, visual format.

• Workshop 2: Java-Dungeon

  This low-code workshop targets pupils who are already familiar with visual programming (like Blockly) but have not yet written actual code. Using a custom-built Visual Studio Code plugin, pupils control the dungeon hero by writing simple Java code. They combine basic programming constructs (like loops and variables) with game-specific commands (such as move, use, etc.), gaining their first experience with real syntax in a motivating, game-oriented environment.

• Workshop 3: Advanced Dungeon

  This workshop is intended for pupils who already have some programming experience. Here, they solve complex in-game coding challenges and are introduced to selected topics in artificial intelligence. The workshop fosters analytical thinking and problem-solving at a more advanced level.

Each workshop is complemented by career-oriented elements: professional software developers share insights into their daily work, and Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI) provides information about studying computer science and career paths in tech.

The project is a collaborative effort between local schools and companies in the OWL (Ostwestfalen-Lippe) region, with HSBI providing both academic leadership and operational coordination.

Spiele-Framework für Digital Game Based Learning

09/2022 - 11/2023, FRFMM-623/2022, Freiraum 2022, Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre

As part of the project, the principles of game-based learning were further explored and applied to the existing Dungeon framework. In contrast to the previous PM-Dungeon project, where students programmed their own games, the focus here was not on game development, but on learning through gameplay.

Students were provided with a fully developed game in which they had to solve subject-specific challenges directly within the game world. Real academic problems were seamlessly integrated with game mechanics - such as crafting or puzzle-solving - to create an engaging and meaningful learning experience. To evaluate student performance, the game included an automated analysis system that detected whether solutions were correct or whether players encountered difficulties during the task. The in-game challenges and puzzles were defined using a custom domain-specific language (DSL). This DSL enables even non-programmers to create and integrate educational tasks and puzzles into the game. It supports a variety of input types, such as single-choice questions, matching tasks, and element combination exercises. Depending on the level of detail provided, the DSL can either generate a specific gameplay scenario or automatically create a diverse game environment in which players must solve tasks to progress. Additionally, a Petri net-based system was implemented to define alternative learning paths. This allows the game to dynamically adapt to the learner's needs - for example, by revisiting topic areas where students previously struggled.

PM-Dungeon

10/2021 - 11/2022, Fellowships für Innovationen in der digitalen Hochschullehre (digi-Fellows), Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft (MKW) in NRW im Einvernehmen mit der Digitalen Hochschule NRW (DH.NRW)

The goal of the project was to motivate computer science students to engage deeply with programming by providing exciting challenges and development environments. A particular focus was placed on promoting self-directed learning, enabling students to explore programming concepts at their own pace and based on their individual interests and progress.

As part of the project:

• Open Educational Resources (OER) were created and published to support teaching programming with Java.
• The Java-based framework Dungeon, built on libGDX, was conceptualized and developed. This framework has since been extended, revised, and optimized through additional projects.

The Dungeon framework was used in the "Programming Methods" course at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI) to teach students advanced programming techniques in Java. Students used the framework to develop their own 2D rogue-like games, applying key programming concepts in a creative and practical way. To support this, the framework provides essential functionalities to simplify complex development tasks. These include a built-in game loop, graphical rendering of textures, an animation system, and tools for level generation and loading. In addition, a submission process called "Deploy to Grading", based on GitHub Actions, was developed. This allows students to submit their code solutions via GitHub pull requests. The submitted code is automatically evaluated using a CI pipeline that includes JUnit tests, Checkstyle, and similar tools - providing immediate, formative feedback and reinforcing the idea of autonomous, feedback-driven learning.

Credits

The assets in game/assets/, dungeon/assets/, devDungeon/assets/, and dungeon-task-manager/Task_Management_Dungeon/src/main/kotlin/icon/ are a mix from free and self created resources:

• Textures and animations:
  • https://0x72.itch.io/16x16-dungeon-tileset (CC0 1.0)
  • https://0x72.itch.io/dungeontileset-ii (CC0 1.0)
• Music and sound effects:
  • https://alkakrab.itch.io/free-12-tracks-pixel-rpg-game-music-pack (CC0 1.0)
  • https://opengameart.org/content/50-rpg-sound-effects (CC0 1.0)
  • https://opengameart.org/content/hurt-death-sound-effect-for-character (CC0 1.0)
  • https://opengameart.org/content/80-cc0-creture-sfx-2 (CC0 1.0)
  • https://freesound.org/s/578488/ (CC0 1.0)
• Icons in dungeon-task-manager/Task_Management_Dungeon/src/main/kotlin/icon/
  • https://www.composables.com/icons (Apache 2.0)
• Adapted and modified by @Flamtky:
  • Files (except Health Potion) in dungeon/assets/items/potion/ (originating from @dkirshner)
  • Files in game/assets/dungeon/*/floor: each floor_damaged.png (originating from @dkirshner)
  • game/assets/dungeon/fire/floor/floor_1.png (originating from @dkirshner)
• Self created by @Flamtky:
  • Files in devDungeon/assets/objects/spawner/

Licenses

Unless otherwise noted, this work by contributors is licensed under MIT.

All files in doc/publication/ are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.