‘Digventure’ is an interactive online game designed to engage young people’s interest in archaeology and inspire the future generation of archaeologists. Noticing the declining interest in archaeology amongst our peer groups, our team decided to develop ‘Digventure’ in an attempt to create a tool which is both fun and educational. The game demonstrates and allows users to experience various processes of an archaeologist’s work such as excavation, documentation and preservation of artifacts. ‘Digventure’ is part of a series of activities we have designed as part of our “Day in the Life of an Archaeologist Workshop”.

We started by identifying a lack of interest in archaeology, and chose to build a 2d game to make it engaging. Using the Godot Engine, we designed the frames with Tilemap and added a CharacterBody2d node for the player. We wrote the movement code in GDScript using input.is_action_pressed(“ui_left”) and ui_right to detect key presses and utilise velocity.x with move_and_slide() to move the character left and right. This was our first time creating a game, so we learnt through testing, debugging and adjusting screen settings to make the game run smoothly.

Our team conducted a survey with 50 secondary school students which showed that the majority of the students were unfamiliar with archaeology. Additionally there was a significant lack of interest in considering archaeology as a potential career path. As a result, our game, ‘Digventure’, was programmed to act as an engaging and educational platform to introduce archaeology to students. After testing this solution with a class of year 7 students, it gained positive outcomes, receiving feedback that “It was engaging and easy to understand. I also actually learnt something!” However, this project would have been a better success if our team had more access to advanced platforms. Due to the time constraints, ‘Digventure’ was not able to be carried out to its full potential. Overall, ‘Digventure’ was a fairly successful project in inspiring young people in considering archaeology as a possible career.