Students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras have developed a digital game to create awareness among the general public, particularly children, on the importance of following the recommended precautions to protect themselves against COVID-19.

The browser-based game can be played on any device, including personal computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. It can be played at Lets Play to Learn for free.

It is also available at the ‘GAME CORNER’ page on the IIT Madras website.

The inspiration for the game came from the popular game, Super Mario. In the one-minute COVID-19 game, students must do the right things to earn maximum points.

Based on feedback, the team of students behind the game translated the game to several regional languages to improve its reach. Apart from English, the game is already available in 12 languages—Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu.

The students plan to make the game available in more regional games in the future.

The students took a nine-credit elective course called ‘Let’s Play to Learn’ offered between January and May 2020 to create the game. The co-facilitators of the game were Preeti Aghalayam, a faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Kartic Vaidyanathan, founder of LetsPlayToLearn and an alumnus of the BTech mechanical engineering batch of 1996.