Promoting Student Agency Through Content Creation in a Game-Based Learning Format

Andreas Fischer October 19, 2026

Prof. Sangmin-Michelle Lee 

Department of Metaverse at Kyung Hee University, Korea

Promoting Student Agency Through Content Creation in a Game-Based Learning Format

Sangmin-Michelle Lee directs the 2xAI Lab at the Kyung Hee University, and studies how AI and immersive technologies are reshaping language learning and creativity. In spring 2025, she taught an interdisciplinary course that humanities and engineering students take together. 

The students played Her Story, a nonlinear murder mystery game, and then co-wrote their own branching interactive stories with custom GPTs. ThingLink was the final stage. Each team chose pivotal scenes, such as an interrogation room, a courtroom, a secret attic, and rebuilt them as explorable 360° spaces: AI-generated panoramas, clues embedded as image, text, and audio tags, and linked scenes leading to different endings. Several teams used their ThingLink as an interactive prologue to the GPT game. 

ThingLink proved remarkably effective for three things Prof. Sangmin-Michelle Lee cares about as a researcher and instructor. 

• Creativity: moving from text to space changed how students thought about narrative; as one put it, the question shifted from “what to say” to “how to deliver it.” 
• Multimodal literacy: students had to orchestrate image, sound, text, and spatial layout into one coherent experience. 
• Agency with AI: ThingLink put students in the director’s chair—they had to keep briefing the AI until a panorama worked as a room, then decide where clues sat, what to hide, and how scenes connected. 

Above all, the students loved it. Many said it was unlike anything they had done before, a fun, eye-opening learning experience that gave them new ways to tell their stories.

Here are two student projects that came out of this project:

Benedict’s Mansion

Sugar-Coated Heart

Thanks to Prof. Sangmin-Michelle Lee for their contribution to this blog post series!

Curious Minds is a guest blog series that spotlights the people behind inspiring academic projects on ThingLink: students, doctoral researchers, scholars, and other curious thinkers who use ThingLink to explore new ideas and bring their work to life. It sheds light on their perspectives and the curiosity driving impactful projects that advance research across diverse fields.