Last Sunday I was invited by UAB (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona) to participate on the final journeys of a project where I participated one year ago. This event took place in Manchester.
Just for introduce a little bit, PROMISE; is a major EU funded research project which aims to explore young people's role in shaping society. The project brings together twelve collaborating centres in Estonia, Finland, Germany, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, the Russian Federation, Croatia and the UK.
Why I am telling you this? Well, the fact is that in that project, we had the chance to participate in a workshop about Gamification and Politics.
Our friends from Yes Forum (@YesForumoffice at Twitter) showed us a perfect example about introducing a complex issue adapted for young people throught games.
Gamification is probably one of the most powerful tools to learn.
The main objective of this is to make young people to learn while they are playing. Maybe they dont even know that they are doing it, but it helps a lot to keep them engaged and motivated to keep learning. This time, and following PROMISE's subject, it was about politics.
We had the chance to play. We separated in two groups and did different rounds and we were representing different countries. Our objective was to fish mermaids as much as we can. And you can negociate with the other countries.
The country with the most mermaids fished wins the game. But you have another way to win. If at the end of the game you have more mermaids at the sea, your entire team wins too with you. So what would you do? Go for your personal prize, go for the team prize or maybe both of them?
We were too focused on the game, so we were not trying to learn nothing. But we also were discussing about how we should do it. We all knew that this is very similar as how works the world were we live. And this is the most powerful side from Gamification. To learn without knowing it.
Finally, want to thank again to all the people that made this experience possible. Thanks to Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) for believe on us. Thanks to the University of Manchester (UOM) for invite us and for the fantástic welcome. And thanks to Yes Forum for this fantastic workshop.
If you have any doubt, or question, remember that you can follow on Twitter and ask anything you need! @BananaGunGames.