War Child Holland and partners: Co-creating a gaming world in Uganda
by Kate Radford, Programme Director of Can’t Wait to Learn
In Uganda, as in other countries where War Child and partners are implementing the tablet-based educational gaming programme, Can’t Wait to Learn, children have been placed at the centre of programme development, design and implementation. During programme start-up, children are involved in needs assessment and game design activities, which includes co-creating the game content, artwork and storyline and ensuring the implementation of inclusive games that allow every child to learn at their own pace.
How the co-creation process works:
Using a participatory model, War Child’s technical partner, Butterfly Works (a social design studio), worked together with War Child and Can’t Wait to Learn’s implementing partner in Uganda, the Norwegian Refugee Council, to undertake a series of visual mapping exercises involving a group of Ugandan illustrators and several groups of children in Imvepi (a settlement for South Sudanese refugees in the Arua district of Uganda). Taking the form of a co-creation workshop, the goal of the exercises was to create a game world storyline, including game character, the game’s overall ‘look and feel’, as well as art assets for the game user interface.
The co-creation process in Uganda commenced with the selection of four groups of 10 children aged 10–14 (in line with the accelerated education target age group in Uganda) in four different schools, including children from both the Ugandan and refugee community.
Step 1: Introducing the concept and purpose
The first step in the process is to clearly explain to the children, together with teachers who provide translation and facilitation support, the purpose of the exercise — to create the characters, storyline and artwork for a new learning tool for reading and mathematics, which will be in the form of a digital game and used on a tablet.
Step 2: Explaining the co-creation process and making the children feel comfortable
Time is also taken to explain the fun and creative exercises that the day involves and the fact that these will help to make the game more specifically tailored to children like themselves. The facilitators explain that the children will draw pictures and build models with blocks and clay that reflect the things, places, people and activities they do, know or see in their own lives. The opportunity is also taken to emphasize that the process is not a test and the children are free to share what they want. The day starts with a fun introduction exercise in which the children share their names and their ages and what they would like to become in the future, to allow the group to get to know each other and feel more comfortable.
Step 3: Drawing their surroundings and assessing illustrations
The next step is for the children to draw their surroundings, including the things and the people they see regularly in their community. The topic is discussed first, after which each child uses paper and markers to start drawing their world.
Whilst the children are drawing, other illustrations showing various categories of objects, such as houses, animals etc., which are drawn in different styles, are reviewed by each child to get a sense of their preferences. Each category includes several drawings, for example children are shown a series of different houses, a series of different teachers etc. Each child comes forward and picks the drawing they like the most in each category. Later, the children are invited to look at a separate set of illustrations and are asked to describe what each represents. This process helps to reveal whether the children would recognise different jobs and activities from the illustrations.
Step 4: Creating everyday tools and objects in clay
The children are then invited to work with coloured clay to make everyday tools and objects that are familiar to them.
Step 5: Building familiar environments
Breaking the children up into groups of two or three, they are finally invited to build a specific location, like a school or market, out of Lego. They can also add Lego characters to their location. During this stage, groups’ explanations of what they are making are recorded by the design researcher through notes and photographs.
Step 6: Immediate feedback
The design of the co-creation process allows for rapid feedback, providing the illustrators with inputs from the children in real time. Pictures of the clay models and lego houses, with explanations added from the design researcher are shared with the artists at the end of each day. The illustrators are also provided with all the children’s drawings, comprehensive notes and photos of the creative activities undertaken, as well as the reactions of the children.
Step 7: Quick iteration
The above steps are part of an iterative process that is undertaken over 4 days. The artists use the inputs from the children to adjust their original draft sketches, which are then tested the next day with the children, who (as per above) indicate their preferences. At the end of each day the artists and design researcher meet to go through all the feedback, as well as the adaptations the illustrators already made during the day, so that remaining co-creation sessions can be planned. A list of the information still needed from the children, as well as a selection of the drawings to be tested with the next group are also collated. Based on all of these inputs, styles are refined and at the end of the 4 days, items and characters are finally selected to be included in the game storyline.
As a result of this co-creation process, the CWTL designers created ten locations, the game guide (Jane), and the characters for each location, each tailored to the children’s input and preferences, and reflecting their own environment from their perspectives.
Placing children at the centre of this process has far reaching benefits. A local interface that reflects children’s reality in both the look and feel of the characters and game design, as well as in the game’s storyline, lowers the threshold for children to engage with the tablet based learning application, particularly if they are new to technology. Thus, the ‘cognitive load’ for children is reduced, and instead of learning to recognise new characters, events and circumstances, children become immersed in a world that reflects their own and are thus able to focus on math and/or reading. That said, in Uganda, the recognisable rural game world that children helped design, was also supplemented with an urban environment, which children can explore in level 3 of the Uganda Maths 1–3 game. This was included because children expressed curiosity about urban environments during the needs assessment and co-creation activities, but had never visited urban settings themselves, thus extending the range of exploration available to the children.
Can’t Wait to Learn aims to become widely adopted, in order to provide quality education to conflict-affected children anywhere in the world. This significant scale-up potential is made possible by the partnerships that form the core of the programme. For more information about War Child’s donors and partners, please visit: https://www.warchildholland.org/partnerships-fuel-expansion/
