Project Mentor: Professor Michael Spear, Computer Science and Engineering

Continuing Fellows:
Theodore Spear '28

2026 Impact Fellows:
Sarah Taylor '29
James Goodwin '29

Project Description:
How can gamifying the college experience help with student preparedness, belonging, and wellbeing?

The "Leveling Up to Lehigh Life" project combines computer science, graphic design, music, storytelling, and marketing to create a casual 2-D game to help incoming students of all backgrounds adapt to life at Lehigh University.  The experience of being a first-year student represents a significant change in social norms, complete with strange vocabulary; unfamiliar social customs; a set of complex, implicit rules for how to interact with professors in person and electronically; and many situations in which small pieces of information, passed mostly by word of mouth, can have a huge impact on academic and social success.  Through interactive quests, conversations, and campus exploration, LUTLL familiarizes players with these nuances before they even arrive on campus. The game introduces essential aspects of Lehigh life, from navigating dining halls and academic resources to building community and maintaining well-being, all within an engaging, narrative-driven environment.

The project goals for 2027 are:

1. Expand the research study through better marketing.  We had about 15% of incoming students interact with the game in 2026, our goal is to hit 70% in 2027, and use our summer 2027 data collection as the basis for a second research paper submission.

2. Launch new “quests” that address more of the challenges that first-year students face during their transition to college life.

3. Launch new “quests” that build a sense of pride in Lehigh, such as visiting all of the outdoor artwork on campus.

4. Design and launch a new “find a roommate” prequel as a multiplayer game.

5.  Implement a multilingual virtual campus tour, so that international high school students and their parents can experience the Lehigh campus in their native language as a way to build a larger base of international applicants to Lehigh.

6. Implement custom modules for transfer students and graduate students.

Note that a wide variety of skills are beneficial for these goals, including marketing, human subject research, graphic design, music composition, foreign languages, and computing.