History

This is what a successful distraction maneuver looked like in our very first course. With plenty of enthusiasm and physical commitment, our learners showed us that they had caught our passion for role-playing games, too. Of course, this wasn’t actually the first session, so let’s start from the beginning.

Once upon a time, there was an Italian course taught by Paola Netti, where the topic of conversation was hobbies. Jonas mentioned Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG). No one in the course had ever played it before, and Paola had never even heard of it. But the concept immediately sparked everyone’s interest. Since pretty much the entire game revolves around talking, Paola was more than happy to give it a try in class. That’s when Jonas brought in his friend Tobias, who already had plenty of experience with role-playing games. The experiment was a complete success: everyone was enthusiastic and simply couldn’t stop talking. Encouraged by this first experience, Paola was even willing to try an entire course based around the concept. There was just one problem: she had never run, let alone written, a role-playing game before. Jonas and Tobias took on that task, and so the first course they created together, Il Professore Scomparso, or The Missing Professor, was born in the summer semester of 2025—the semester in which the picture above was taken. Together, they developed their own course concept, combining TTRPGs and language learning to bring out the best qualities of both.