The Challenge: How can you make morphology, the study of grammatical units of speech, fun for middle school children?

The Solution: Part of the The World of Lexica, Ink Blott Underground is a fun English Language Arts (ELA) game where players dig through a series of crystal-filled caves and bring their vivid world back to life by using word parts to fix broken words and sentences. Essentially, the game educates students on prefixes and suffixes in relation to root words.

The object of this game is to help Blott the Inkling. Inklings are inky, resourceful mole-like creatures that live below the ground in the literary world. Blott must work tirelessly to revitalize and maintain the dense and perilous Verbose Underground. Players work to guide Blott through caverns to collect crystals and unlock levels; however, the paths to the caverns are often blocked. Blott must repair corrupted words or sentences to unblock the paths to the caverns in order to reach the crystals and unlock the level. As players progress through the levels, they are introduced to more sophisticated gameplay and a higher degree of difficulty in word pairings.

More information about this game can be found at Touch Press Games.

The Results: Ink Blott Underground became one of the favorite mini-games inside The World of Lexica and received recognition at the International Serious Play Conference.

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