Gamified learning and immersive narratives can offer engaging ways to capture students’ interest. While the impacts of these types of experiences have been widely studied, production remains costly and time-consuming. We aim to contribute a replicable template, which we call our Way of World-building (WoW) shell, to improve efficiency and minimize barriers to immersive learning. The WoW shell incorporates elements of collaborative design with input from content experts, instructional designers, storytellers, and developers. Our case study is the Weather Wows project, a series of brief explorative stories for an online undergraduate Introduction to Meteorology lecture course. Each scene is broken down into three sections: narrative introduction, explorative interactions, and narrative conclusion. The stories and environments relate upcoming learning materials to real-world scenarios—from Australia to Venezuela—for context and motivation. Weather Wows topics include wildfires, precipitation, wind, lightning, forecast data, and climate. Five consistent interaction types are tailored to each topic: Find Out More, Can You Guess, Impact Imagery, Scene Selection, and Critical Thinking. These interactions are scalable and customizable depending on content needs and technical skill sets. After completion, players receive a badge that can be shared as proof of participation. Alignment with learning objectives is a top priority throughout the design process. We are actively developing the approximately five-minute scenes for mobile devices using Unity Engine, and we hope to make Unity templates available publicly at the conclusion of the project. The resulting materials can be used in online or in-person classrooms to prime students at the start of new modules, as Weather Wows are intended, or repurposed to serve as detailed lessons or assessments. Our goal in providing a WoW shell is to make science and immersive learning technologies more approachable to a wider variety of classrooms and subjects.

Keywords: Mobile Experience, STEM Education, Gamification, Collaborative Design.