One Page Summary

With our solution we are addressing the following challenges:
- Motivate the students to think for themselves in a critical and analytical way
- Promote empathy towards the other, active listening and understanding
- Working creativity and problem solving
- Practising teamwork, effective communication and decision taking
Our solution aims to satisfy this needs through different ways:
- Offering the games we have developed, plus others to be developed according to results and needs of Go Free. Each game has its own fantastic storyline, which enables the student to enter a fantasy world where he can temporally forget about world’s rules, open his mind, and align with the objectives of the game, which the challenges described in the previous point.
- Our games are based upon 4 main axes: a fantastic storyline, empowerment of the student, fun and simple game mechanics, and humour.
- Problem solving techniques are addressed through a challenge that consists on the students discovering by themselves scientific discoveries. Students will be helped through different clues, more obvious each time, until they make the discovery by themselves. This way the students are not just taught for example how it was proved that the earth is round, but they will have to think in a way to prove it by themselves.
- Problem solving, critical thinking and teamwork will also be practiced, as our solution does not consist on right and wrong questions, but on different types of challenges and innovative ways to learn, such as:
o Open questions
o Dilemmas and debates
o Students becoming representatives of different kinds of wisdoms or knowledges, hence teaching and learning from other students.
o Students giving score among themselves
o Different style of achievements proposed. I.e.: active listening and understanding, empathy towards the other, creativity, social and emotional intelligence, etc.
o Challenges consisting on analysing events from real life: news, ads, etc. and o on real life conflict situations, which students will have to solve with empathy and wisdom, using different techniques.
o The action does not only take place during the game, as in our videogames the students can give rewards to others in the form of medals when the videogame is over. They do so when they see a mate practicing in real life the values that they practised during the game (i.e. a gender equality attitude, standing against bullying, empathy, etc.). The medals received are stored in a personal file, allowing the High School, or Go Free, to give him real reward to those students who received more medals from the companions.
Implementing our solution requires internet connection plus smartphones or tablets (for some of the games), and compromised educators. Because although in the mid term the benefits will make it worth it, at the beginning an extra effort will be required by the educator, who will have to learn a new methodology and explain it to the students.
There are competitors like Kahoot, Wooclap, Tovaari, Classcraft or others, but there are some characteristics that make our solution unique:
o It is not based on right and wrong questions
o Combines virtual games with physical games. The physical games can be card or board games. Although we can develop the possibility to replace the physical board game for a board displayed on the screen of a tablet, where the physical meeples will be placed and moved.
o Our solution does not just provide games already made. It also consists of a ‘game maker’, Wisdomini Maker, which allows the teacher to make his own game, with different types of challenges and introducing his or her own questions on the theme to be worked with the students. Even the students themselves can write the questions that will then be introduced in the game, after the teacher has revised them.
o We are open to all improvements asked by Go Free, like designing and developing another Game Maker with the requirements stated by Go Free.
The main strength we see in scaling our solution to a different context is that the abilities we deal with are the most needed by organizations nowadays: social, emotional, creative, and critical thinking abilities. Therefore, these kind of games can be played in any country, and on any context (classroom, home, summer camps, etc.).
Our system can be implanted easily in the classroom, without need of training on the field to the teachers.
So far, we have developed 8 videogames (Mirror, Archetypes, Wisdómini, Emparchís, We are Animals, Creative Animal, Arreit, City Watch) and one videogame-maker (Wisdómini).
Espejo, Archetypes, and Emparchís have been tested so far in 5 High Schools (over 500 students), whereas Wisdomini Maker has been tested in one (20 students), and Creative Animal has been tested by over 50 university students.
City Watch is a game made for Madrid Government to raise awareness against gender violence, that is now being revised by the government