Welcome to Operation LAPIS

 

Operation LAPIS began over 10 years ago as an attempt to bring the very best of game-based learning to language learning. In doing so, we created a sweeping role-playing game where the students (as young Romans) were immersed in a narrative spanning hundreds of years of Roman history on a quest to find a mythical and powerful object known as the Lapis Saeculorum.

 

We learned a lot about student engagement, motivation, language acquisition, affective filter (both for instructors and students alike), and general usability and simplicty. The result is a reimagined LAPIS experience. 

 

 

At it's core, Operation LAPIS is a narrative experience designed to help build interpretive reading ability in Latin. It's not rooted in a grammar syllabus but rather aims to answer some fundamental questions about who the Romans were in order to also build intercultural comptency.

 

The instructor materials and curricular overview guides are designed to help instructors understand the components and how they fit together to this larger goal. There are a healthy mix of fictional and informational texts as well as many additional avenues for cultural and historical exploration. Each "episode" also contains tasks and activities to further build proficiency in the language and intercultural communication. 

 

Really, though, everything is centered around the main narrative arc -- as a intereactive story where you choose your own path, the students are meant to take on the role of the two main protagonists: Recentia Octaviana and her brother Gaius Recentius Bellator. The students "controlling" the actions of these two individuals will help uncover the mystery, and more importantly, the location of the Lapis in order to save civilization as we know it. More on that, later.

 

For now, explore the following pages:

 

 

 

For each of the episodes, the curricular overview will provide the following for instructors:

  • Essential Questions which spiral through the curriculum
  • Cultural and Historical Learning Targets which tie to the Essential Questions
  • Performance Descriptors from the Standards as reference
  • Episode Plot Synopsis
  • Direct links to instructional resources (which can be utilized in any LMS):
    • The start of the choose-your-own-adventure episode
    • Supplemental informational and fictional texts
    • Tasks and Activities releated to the readings
    • Additional Cultural and Historical information relevant to the episode
  • Suggested workflow for the episode