The Centre for Warsaw Culture Studies (CBKW) at the University of Warsaw (UW), in collaboration with the UW Centre for Digital Competence, has launched the educational platform ‘With Polish in Warsaw’. Within the created project, several educational tools were prepared, including a series of films and audio materials (“Polish pronunciation in theory and practice”), recordings of Warsaw legends, textbooks and exercises (“With Polish through Warsaw”), educational games and date books in Polish and Ukrainian. Now, the project has been expanded with a new tool – a mobile language and guide application “Play in Polish”.

The ‘Play in Polish’ app, the first of its kind in Poland, enables language learning in historical, literary, cultural, and geographical aspects. It combines educational, glottodidactic, historical-cultural and guiding competences while using gamification tools.

“The originality of the project is the integration of educational forms and methods and their subordination to two objectives: the classic learning of the Polish language and the acquisition of knowledge concerning the broad historical, literary, cultural and even geographical context related to Warsaw”, explains Professor Elżbieta Wichrowska, who, together with Dorota Paszyńska from the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw, was responsible for the substantive development of the application.

Thanks to the created application, the Polish language can be learnt through real or virtual walks through the streets of Warsaw, which combine learning the language with discovering the charms of the city. During the walk, the player using the tool gains knowledge relating to the monuments and symbols of Warsaw and the history of Poland, as well as overcoming successive language difficulty thresholds, for which he or she earns virtual points and prizes.

Adrian Andrzejewski