Magister Ludorum gamification

Under the banner Magister Ludorum (Latin for Teacher of games) Jochum van Weert creates educational games and apps that make learning fun. What started as a sideproject to build an educational game to teach my own kids the letters of the alphabet, evolved into a portfolio of educational games and apps with tens of thousands of users worldwide.

About Jochum van Weert

After completing a master in Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology I decided to obtain a teachers-degree in Computer Science. Soon after I started teaching Computer Science at the Stedelijk Gymnasium van ’s-Hertogenbosch. Teaching adolescents the joy of computer science and programming is great, but creating things myself is in my blood too. The educational games of Magister Ludorum satisfy this need to create. The multidimensional dicipline of gamedevelopment (code, artwork, gamedesign, promotion) makes it a great medium to express creativity and to challenge myself to learn and try new things, while creating something useful in the process.

When I’m not teaching or working on my Magister Ludorum projects, you can find me playing bass and singing in the rockband Duskhead.

History of Magister Ludorum

As a dad of young kids and as a creative code-person it seemed like a fun project to build an educational game to teach my kids the letters of the alphabet. This resulted in the game Lollige Letters (Dutch for Cheery Letters) that currently has over 25.000 downloads from the mobile app stores.

After that I built the game Dolio. This teaches spelling to kids by having them navigate a ball through a maze by tilting their device. The goal is to pick up the letters of words in the right order thereby spelling the required word.

As a teacher at a Gymnasium (a Dutch high school type with Latin or Greek as mandatory subject), I’m surrounded by students learning (and colleagues teaching) Latin. This inspired the most important project to date: Grammaticus Maximus. Grammaticus Maximus has students practice Latin grammar by defending Rome from plundering barbarians. Since Latin is taught and studied worldwide, I’ve translated the app in 7 languages and it has passed the 25.000 downloads mark in the app stores.

Along the way I’ve completed several smaller projects:

• Greek letterquiz is a quiz that helps students practice and test their knowledge of the Greek alphabet.
• Muismeester is a project I made on request to help the elderly and people with disabilities to practice using the computer mouse.
• KoppieKoppie is a simple webtool that helps teachers practice the names of their students. It uses a format compatible with a popular student information system in Holland