The event was big success:

• 2 days of conferences with more than 150 participants

• 40 international speakers organized into 4 thematic tracks

• 2 networking sessions with professionals from various sectors

• An exibition of video games with social impact, including the games developed during the CIVIS GAME JAM

We recorded the whole conference and it’s now available on a Youtube playlist…

…and the new Gallery section of the CIVIS website includes all the media about both CIVIS GAME JAM and the Conference.

Thanks a lot to all the people who made it possible!

Thank you to all the people who supported us, collaborated on our projects or simply played our games during our first 10 years! Yes, VGWB turns 10 years old… and I have decided to recount everything we have achieved together, year by year.

I really hope you enjoy reading it and that we all will be here in 10 years, still sharing our passion for video games and social impact.

2015 - From a joke to a vision

Everything started with a joke. Miriam, my partner in life, was organizing a mission to Africa with Clowns Without Borders so I joked: “If you are going with Clowns Without Borders I’ll go with Video Games Without Borders!”. Hearing my voice was inspiring and Video Game Without Borders became a reality on the 22nd of February of 2015, a couple of weeks before leaving for Burkina Faso.

During a 6-month stay in Burkina Faso, we tried to develop an interactive tale (The Stinky Lions) with local talents but the project has never been completed. We also collaborated with the local Computer Science university experimenting with a training program in video game development (Play Lab).

During fall, once back in Europe, we formalized the vision and the first people started joining the VGWB Community.

2016 - Antura was born

In January 2016, recognizing the scarcity of literacy programs for the estimated 2.5 million displaced Syrian children whose education had been disrupted by years of conflict, a Norway-led coalition launched the EduApp4Syria call for innovation with a total budget of 1.7 million dollars.

We joined forces with Cologne Game Lab (part of a German public university) and Wixel Studios (a Lebanese game development studio) and applied to the competition with the concept for Antura and the Letters. A few weeks later, our concept was founded in the first round and we could start the development of what will become our flagship game. By the end of the year, we had a playable Alpha version and Antura and the Letters was selected as a finalist of the EduApp4Syria call for innovation.

2017 - And the winner is…

In March, at UNESCO Mobile Learning Week, Antura and the Letters was announced as winner of the EduApp4Syria call for innovation and its Beta version was field tested in Azraq refugee camp (Jordan) during the summer. Later, an independent impact evaluation was published showing its positive effect both on literacy level and psychosocial wellbeing of the refugee children.

Throughout the year, Video Games Without Borders was selected by two of the best acceleration programs focused on social impact in Spain: B-Value and BBVA Momentum.

In December, Antura and the Letters received the first award of its long list: Best Serious Game of the Year at the Fun & Serious Games Festival in Bilbao.

2018 - Antura goes to America

After improving the game to address all the recommendations from the field testing, the first official version of Antura and the Letters was published on Apple App Store and Google Play Store and all its code/assets were released under open source/creative commons licenses.

The game reached 100.000 downloads before the end of 2018, being presented at conferences all around the world and receiving several international awards.

In the meantime, we secured the funding for the first expansion of the game: a contract by Plan Ceibal (Uruguay’s digital technology center for education innovation at the service of public education policies) to adapt the original learn-to-read in Arabic game to learn English as a foreign language.

2019 - More and more Antura games Antura grows up

We received support from Facebook to run a promotion campaign in areas with high density of refugees, allowing Antura and the Letters to pass the 250.000 downloads mark.

A special version of the game with instructions in Moroccan Arabic, Antura et les Lettres (de la Darija à l’Arabe), was developed in collaboration with the Fondation Touria et Abdelaziz Tazi from Casablanca.

The brand new game Learn English with Antura was released worldwide apart from being distributed to all public school students in Uruguay.

We also adapted the original Arabic game Antura and the Letters in order to be used by ProFuturo as part of their digital learning solution in Lebanon.

Finally, in December, we received UNHCR’s NGO Innovation Award in Geneva with a small funding that allowed to kick off the adaptation of Antura to help Afghan children learning to read in the main local languages (Dari and Pashto), developed in collaboration with Code to Inspire and Partnership Afghanistan Canada,

2020 - The year of the pandemic

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched Flatten Island, a game designed to promote health awareness and support initiatives combating the virus. This project, developed in a few weeks only with volunteers from our community, demonstrated the organization's adaptability in addressing current global challenges through gaming.

Building on the experience from the previous year, we developed and released Learn French with Antura in collaboration with the Institut Français of Morocco, with the goal of helping local kids attending school in French. After that, all Antura projects were put on standby for a few months for the lack of funding opportunities because of the pandemic.

Towards the end of the year we kicked-off IEEDO (Increasing and Enhancing Effective Digital Opportunities for refugees and migrants), our first 3-year long EU Erasmus+ project in collaboration with several European partners.

2021 - Helping Afghan families under Talibans’ ruling

The early phases of the IEEDO project consisted in researching the needs of refugees settling into a new country and the organizations helping them. Once the research was completed we started with the design and the development of the digital solution, a gamified personal assistant for the migrants and an online training module for the social workers tutoring them during the process.

The summer of 2021 was marked by the return to power of Talibans in Afghanistan. Ubisoft, one of the largest video game publishers in the world, decided to take action providing financial support for Antura for Afghanistan. This way we were able to resume the adaptation of Antura to help Afghan children learn to read in the main local languages (Dari and Pashto).

We also collaborated with Ubisoft in the localization of their game Rabbids Coding to Dari (Persian) language.

2022 - Antura for Ukraine

In February, while we were working on Antura for Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine started and millions of Ukrainian families (mainly women and children) fled the country. In a few weeks, more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees were registered in the neighbouring European countries, all of them facing a major language barrier! In collaboration with our long-term partner Cologne Game Lab, we decided to act and expand the Antura project to help Ukrainian kids, in this case to learn the local language. Building on Learn English with Antura and Learn French with Antura, we decided to adapt the game to teach also Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, German, Italian and Spanish.

Facing the risk of having too many Antura apps on the stores, we decided to reorganize the whole project and merge all the learning content into a single app that offers both learn-to-read and learn-a-language curriculums in several languages. At the beginning of the summer we released Antura and the Letters 2.0 with the new system and a few languages, then we added more and more languages during the following weeks. A new communication campaign targeting Ukrainian families was launched with the Cologne Game Lab and the game reached 300.000 downloads. Finally, at the German Developer Award 2022 in December, Antura and the Letters received the Special Award for Social Commitment.

In the meantime and throughout all year, using an iterative approach, alternating development and user testing, we released several versions of the IEEDO mobile app. At the same time, together with our partners, we produced and translated all the content for the online training module for the social workers.

2023 - A new wave of projects

The year 2023 marked the end of the IEEDO project with the dissemination of its results and the beginning of a new EU Erasmus+ project, ANTURA (interactive learning game for refugee and migrANT children's inclUsion and integRAtion). In a few words, the new project has been designed to support migrant and refugee children in learning the language of their host country and better integrating themselves into their new environments by improving the existing Antura and the Letters learn-a-language modules and by creating a new module to discover the local culture.

In spring, we released Voy a La Noria, a puzzle game that explains the work carried out by the Center for Social Innovation La Noria in the province of Malaga. In the game, players are challenged to achieve the maximum social impact in the province, placing a variety of real projects so that they carry out their work optimally and have the greatest possible impact in the territory.

Finally, 2023 has also seen the kick-off of the collaboration on Hexplorando, a cozy 3D puzzle game for PC/Windows that allows the player to discover the landscape and cultural heritage of Europe. Contrary to all other projects, this is a commercial game that will be available on Steam: VGWB supports the development and the promotion of the game in exchange for the rights of using its games system and assets for its own educational and cultural projects. Hexplorando received a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture to support the development, a special mention at AEVI Innovation Grants and it was part of Vortex’s Official Selection, before presenting its first playable demo at the BIG Conference in Bilbao.

2024 - Our first international conference

Hexplorando has been growing throughout the year presenting a Demo of the Puzzle Mode at Guadalindie (Malaga) in May and a Demo of the Sandbox Mode at IndieDevDay (Barcelona) in September. The project has also started looking for additional funding both for the commercial game and for its educational/cultural versions.

In 2024 we organized our first major event, the International Conference on Videogames and Social Impact (CIVIS). On November 18-19, Malaga hosted a 2-day conference around 4 thematic tracks with dozens of international speakers, networking sessions and an exposition of games with social impact. The conference was organized with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and in collaboration with several local and international partners.

Moreover, in collaboration with MálagaJam and with the sponsorship of the Diputación de Málaga, through the Centro de Innovación Social La Noria, and Fundación La Caixa, we organized CIVIS GAME JAM: a game jam about impact video games that uses Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals as a thematic frame of reference. All 18 games created during the game jam were demoed at the CIVIS conference.

The development of the ANTURA European project started after a deep phase of research on the target audience, their habits and their needs. A first playable prototype of the new module was playtested in France with dozens of children and its concept has been validated, preparing the production pipeline for the development of the full module that will be tested both in France and Poland in 2025. In the meantime, Antura and the Letters passed the 400.000 downloads mark.

2025 and beyond…

Stay tuned for many more impactful projects to come!

On 18 and 19 November, we are organising the International Conference on Video Games and Social Impact (CIVIS) at the Polo Nacional de Contenidos Digitales (Malaga).

CIVIS is a professional event that aims to establish links between the world of video games, social organisations and educational and cultural entities. We will count on the participation of dozens of national and international speakers from academia, institutions and the games industry.

In addition to conferences and workshops, there will be a table of local experiences to find out what is being done in Malaga about videogames and social impact, a table on financing and internationalisation of impact videogames and a networking space to share and get to know other projects.

We will also have an exhibition area where we will be able to play different games with social impact as well as all the games developed during one of the satellite events of the conference, the CIVIS GAME JAM, which took place on the 18th, 19th and 20th of October.

We invite all those who consider videogames to be an interesting tool for achieving social impact to participate. From the organisation we want to facilitate the participation in the event, so it is completely free of charge.

At VGWB we believe in the transformative potential of video games. We believe that video games are cultural products and, as such, they are capable of creating and modifying meanings; therefore, they can be a tool to understand and transform our realities.

Join us! Be part of the change!

Video Games Without Borders and a new indie team led by veteran dev Francesco Cavallari announce Hexplorando, a cozy 3D puzzle game that will challenge players to solve puzzles that unlock natural resources, human settlements, and historical landmarks around Europe. From the dunes of southern Spain to historical landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Hexplorando challenges players to discover Europe’s wonders in a relaxed way and rewards their creativity with endless procedural quests in Sandbox Mode. 

Discover Europe. Relax putting pieces together. Create your unique landscapes.

ABOUT THE GAME

The European continent is bursting with history, natural wonders and urban settlements. Its landscape is also a puzzle that explains our history since the earliest civilizations. Hexplorando is a relaxed, cozy 3D puzzle where players must put hexagonal pieces on the map. Each puzzle starts with a set of tiles and it’s up to the players to find the right way to fit all of them into the available slots, taking into account that every tile can only be placed where its borders match the surrounding tiles. Once completed a puzzle players can choose the next one among the neighbouring ones, expanding the map little by little and unveiling the marvels of European heritage.

The game also features a Sandbox Mode for players who want to test their creativity. In this mode, tiles can be placed anywhere, even if their borders don’t match their surroundings, but the score will be higher depending on how many of them match perfectly. All special tiles with Europe’s natural and cultural heritage, once unlocked in Puzzle Mode, will be available for the players’ creations. 

Thanks to procedural quests, a variety of environments and a customization panel, Hexplorando offers an additional and never-ending relaxing game mode to reward creativity. 
 

KEY FEATURES

• Relaxing and addictive gameplay

• Easy-to-use controls (you can play only with the mouse)

• No time limit, no game over, just play as long as you like

• Low-poly 3D art with a warm palette

• Put the whole Europe together, piece by piece, in Puzzle Mode 

• Unlock hundreds of natural and historical landmarks

• Build endless and unique landscapes in Sandbox Mode

• Dozens of hours of play in Puzzle Mode, infinite replay value in Sandbox Mode

ASSETS

You can download Hexplorando’s screenshots and other graphical assets in this link.

CONTACT

You can contact us at info@jaleopr.com. 

ABOUT VIDEO GAMES WITHOUT BORDERS

Video Games Without Borders (VGWB) is a nonprofit organisation and a global community of people that believe in digital games to change the world for the better. That’s why they develop and distribute video games for social impact, starting with educational games.

Their flagship title, Antura and the Letters, helps Syrian, Afghan and Ukrainian children learn how to read and discover a foreign language to help their integration in a new country.

It has already demonstrated its positive impact in an independent test in Azraq refugee camp in Jordan and it has received several international awards and nominations. The game is completely free and open source.

ABOUT FRANCESCO CAVALLARI

Francesco is an award-winner veteran game developer with 25 years of experience having held both technical and leadership positions at Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest video games producing companies.

At Ubisoft, he took part in the development of all sorts of games, including critically acclaimed titles (like Beyond Good and Evil or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) and casual blockbusters (like My Secret World by Imagine or Motion Sports), until 2014 when he decided to quit when he was Production Director of Ubisoft Barcelona.

Francesco is a firm believer in the potential of developing and using digital games for good. In 2015 he founded Video Games Without Borders (or VGWB) and has been overseeing its operations since then.

Video Games Without Borders turns 9 years old!

It was February 2015 when our association was founded to study, develop and promote videogames for positive social impact. It has been an amazing journey so far and we are convinced that the future will be even better!

If you want to read our story: 👉🏼 https://vgwb.org/about/

▶️ Antura workshop in France

In January the Antura Erasmus+ project started development with a 3 days workshop in Angers, France. ( 👉🏼 read here about the kickoff meeting last December in Cologne)

Since we are in a collaborative research project to create an application to facilitate immigrant kids to understand of the culture and social codes of a host country, while acquiring basic knowledge of the language, we need first to understand the real needs and situations of the kids, their parents and the teachers / educators dealing with them.

With three researchers (German, Italian, French) and translators, we went to meet parents, pupils, teachers, school mediators and educators in various schools in Maine-et-Loire. Guided by questionnaires and activities we prepared and translated, we held extensive discussions with everyone involved and we identified three particular topics to be worked on as a priority:

• understanding the school and how it works

• understanding the city and how it works

• knowing the essential elements of French history and geography

We also gathered information about the video-games kids are used to play and on what devices, the attitude of parents about video games and their daily life in a foreign town and country.

We saw how educators are working, the ways they support allophone pupils, the structures and the resources.

These meetings and exchanges helped to forge valuable links between researchers-teachers-students-parents-mediators/educators.

Parents were particularly appreciative of these extended exchanges. They were able to come back at length and confidently explain their difficulties in understanding the social codes, the implicit and invisible aspects of the school system, and expressed their need to know more about the geography and history of France. The children enjoyed working alongside their parents.

Exchanges took place in different languages and everyone was able to express themselves by switching from one language to another. Cristiana, an Italian-speaking Romanian mother, particularly appreciated the time she spent talking to Stefano in Italian, without the need for a translator.

The translators, mediators and educators also appreciated this cooperative effort, and are delighted to be involved in the three years of the project.

Now the same assessments will be carried out in Poznam (Poland) and we’ll merge the outcome as starting point for the real game design phase in March, to be play-tested with these kids and parents this summer.

We’ll keep you informed with this newsletter and you are free to follow the opensource development at 👉🏼 https://github.com/vgwb/Antura/

▶️ Hexplorando

The development of Hexplorando is progressing well and we have recently completed the first demo including both game modes: 

• In the Puzzle Mode you can discover the landscape and cultural heritage of Spain: each region is a puzzle that brings art, territory, and history to life

• The heritage elements can be used in the limitless Sandbox Mode, with procedural quests to help you unleash your creativity

Be sure to sign up to our Discord server if you want to try the Demo!

Heplorando will be released on Steam in the coming months: be sure to add it to your Wishlist! 👉🏼 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2736590/hexplorando/

🕺Join our community!

If you want to stay in contact with people like us or participate in the design or development of social impact games, test new projects, help translations or just find people who promotes these kind of projects, you are invited to our Discord community server: 👉🏼 https://discord.gg/GYwkaZt

We just require your real name (you can set it just for this server, you know) and a minimal introduction of yourself.

If you are reading this newsletter online, you are invited to subscribe, like, comment and share it. We would like to be in touch with all the international community of people interested in social impact games.

After 8 years from our foundation we are about to level up with new projects and an international reorganization.

Every month we’ll send you an email with updates on the games we are working on, insights from our community and information on social impact games.

We also renewed our community platform, from Slack we moved to Discord.

Please stay tuned, join our community and let’s play together.

Wish you an Happy and Impactful 2024!

▶️ Hexplorando

We want to present you the latest project we are collaborating on: “Hexplorando” is a relaxed 3D puzzle that allows you to discover Spain, its territory and its heritage through thousands of mini-puzzles.

We are developing it with the help of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and we presented it last week at the Bilbao International Games (BIG) Conference. The reception of the game was great and we have received a boost of energy and love for the next phases of development. We will keep you informed of any progress.

Heplorando will be released on Steam in 2024 and this is the pre-release page where you are invited to see the preview video and put it on your Wishlist!

👉🏼 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2736590/hexplorando/

▶️ Antura goes to Europe

We started the Antura and the Letters project in 2016 as a free and opensource videogame to teach syrian kids to read in arabics. It has been awarded several times and evolved in the years including other languages like ukrainian, persian, polish, french, english, hungarian, russian, german.

A few weeks ago Francesco and Stefano were in Cologne to kickoff a new European Erasmus Plus project that will evolve Antura to teach cultural elements to kids migrating around Europe. In next three years we’ll upgrade everything and test with migrant kids both in France and in Poland.

We’ll keep you informed with this newsletter and you are free to follow the opensource development at 👉🏼 https://github.com/vgwb/Antura/

📖 EdTech solutions and conflict-affected children

“In times of conflict and war, EdTech enables us to reach these children who are living in tremendously challenging environments.” (Roberta Golinkoff)

What kinds of EdTech solutions can benefit conflict-affected children? In this three-part series, Aisha Schnellmann speaks with EdTech leaders about new apps and programs, the impact EdTech could have beyond formal education, and overcoming the unique challenges of reaching children in difficult circumstances.

Francesco Cavallari participated in this conversation:

1. https://bold.expert/can-edtech-bridge-learning-gaps-for-conflict-affected-children/

2. https://bold.expert/can-edtech-support-more-than-learning-for-conflict-affected-children/

3. https://bold.expert/the-challenges-of-implementing-edtech-solutions-for-conflict-affected-children/

▶️ La Noria videogame

Last summer we released this small videogame that explains the work of the Center for Social Innovation La Noria in the Province on Malaga, Spain, 👉🏼 https://vgwb.org/projects/lanoria/

It was initially released as mobile game but now you can play it online with localizations in english and italian: 👉🏼 https://vgwb.itch.io/noria

Please tell us what you think in the comments or on Discord!
PS: it’s free and open-source on GitHub, if you are interested.

Leave a comment

🕺Our community on Discord

If you feel the need to stay in contact with people like us or participate in the design or development of social impact games, test new projects, help translations or just find people who promotes these kind of projects, you are invited to our Discord community server: 👉🏼 https://discord.gg/GYwkaZt

We just require your real name (you can set it just for this server, you know) and a minimal introduction of yourself. Then things could evolve.

If you are reading this newsletter online, you are invited to subscribe, like, comment and share it. We would like to be in touch with all the international community of people interested in social impact games.

We are very satisfied with the success of the Spanish event “The video game as social impact generator” that was held yestarday at La Noria, Malaga.
Apart from listening to various inspiring case study about using video games for social impact, we had the opportunity to present in detail our latest games “Voy a La Noria” and “IEEDO“.

Using innovative game based learning methodologies, the Erasmus+ funded IEEDO project aims to reduce the disparity refugees and humanitarian migrants currently face in European adult education, helping them to develop skills and knowledge for digital self-learning. Thus, building resilience through innovative customised eLearning resources. The project will also support adult/ community education providers and tutors, to reduce the disparity individuals face in European adult education.

The whole event was streamed on Youtube, so you can rewatch at anytime here.

Thanks to everybody who attended the event!

10 years ago the Center for Social Innovation La Noria opened its doors with the goal to promote social innovation in the Province on Malaga (Spain). Today we release our latest production, Voy a La Noria, a puzzle game in which we simulate the work done by the center.
In each game we will have to try to achieve the maximum social impact in the province of Malaga by locating different projects so that they perform their work optimally and have the greatest possible social impact on the territory. All the projects used are part of the program of support for Social Innovation that La Noria and the Provincial Council of Malaga have carried out together with La Caixa Foundation since the foundation of the center 10 years ago.

The video game aims to present La Noria and its work to anyone who plays it, making known a large number of projects that have passed through the center during these 10 years.
The objectives of the game are:

• disseminate the work of La Noria focusing on the Social Innovation projects carried out within the collaboration agreement with La Caixa Foundation.

• to transmit key concepts of the center’s work (territory where it operates, social innovation projects it develops and key concepts of its technical work)

• to review in a few minutes the key aspects of the center in a playful, simple and accessible way to any audience.

Discover more about the project on Github: https://github.com/vgwb/LaNoria

On December 8, the German Developer Award 2022 (Deutscher Entwicklerpreis) was awarded to the best games of German-speaking developers & publishers… and we are very proud to announce that Antura & the Letters has won the award in the category Special Award for Social Commitment – presented by Gaming-Aid e.V.!

The Antura Initiative is an applied research program investigating the use of games for children’s education and psychosocial well-being. In 2016, it started with the development and distribution of an arabic literacy game to help Syrian refugee children acquire the basics of reading in their mother tongue. Then the trajectory shifted to the development and distribution of a game teaching the basics of a foreign language, aiding the integration of refugees in a host country. In light of the war in Ukraine, new language versions were developed, focusing on countries like Poland, Romania, Moldova and Hungary, that are hosting the most refugees from Ukraine. The app helps children acquire a basic vocabulary of the respective host country and is also intended to provide them with further psychosocial support. 

www.antura.org

Our new game, Flatten Island is available for web and Android (only in Spain for now).

Flatten Island has been designed to help initiatives that are fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, in fact players are invited to donate to support those causes.

Discover more on http://flattenisland.org/ (website only in Spanish at the moment)

PS: the international release of the game is planned for later this month.

Every year, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency rewards innovation applied to help refugees thrive with the NGO Innovation Award. This year the award received 266 submissions from 59 countries and after a thorough selection process, a Jury panel selected the three winners of this year’s edition…and Video Games Without Borders is among them!

We believe that accessible and engaging digital games can be a powerful tool to promote literacy and the psychosocial wellbeing of children around the world. 

In two years Antura and The Letters has helped refugee children to learn reading and its efficacy was put to the test in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. We are now planning to expand it to Afghanistan. 

The award ceremony took place on the 16th of December during the Global Refugee Forum at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

Thanks a lot to Techfugees and all partners who will help us bring Antura And The Letters to Afghanistan: Code to Inspire, Partnership Afghanistan Canada, Cologne Game Lab and Roshan!

We strongly believe in digital games as part of the innovations we need to change the world for the better. There is a growing interest in using digital entertainment for social change and the award will allow us to speed up the development of our project and accelerate our impact.

If you are interested in supporting our projects, why not become our Patron?

We are a small non-profit organization and our administrative and overhead costs are low. Your donations go directly to the implementation of our programs and they will have a direct impact on improving children’s education.

Your donation can be as little as $1 per month. And with $1 we can provide basic literacy for one child!

Click here to become our patron and help refugee children learn reading wherever they are and without Internet connection.

Barcellona #4YFN

A few months ago, Techfugees launched its first Global Challenges, a competition aimed at innovators who run a technological project addressing displaced people’s needs in one of our five priority areas of work (access to rights & information, health, education, employment and social inclusion). We received more than a hundred applications from around the world!

By analyzing compliance with our 8 Guiding Principles, their business models, reported impact on displaced people’s lives, our Jury of experts selected and invited 25 finalists to come and pitch their projects at the Techfugees Global Summit 2018 at Station F on October the 26th.

📼 Have a look at the 25 #TFChallenges18’ finalists video pitches here!

One winner was chosen per category by a Jury of high profile experts, resulting in 5 laureates: Integreat, Shifra, Antura and the letters, Taqadam and Refugees Are. Techfugees has since then been working very closely with the 5 winning teams and defining how to support their growth over the coming year.

Meet Francesco & Emmanuel from the Antura and the Letters Team, Winner in the #TFChallenges18 Education category 🏆

Antura & The Letters is a free and open source smartphone game designed to help refugee children learn reading, no matter where they are and with no need for Internet connexion. It has been developed by a consortium including Cologne Game Lab / TH Köln, Video Games Without Borders and Wixel Studios.

For now, the game is available only in Arabic and focuses on Syrian young refugees. But the consortium is committed to scale its offer to other languages (English as a foreign language…) and contexts (for example illiterate adults to help their integration in their host communities…).

Techfugees will support this ambition in 2019 by connecting Antura and the Letters with major NGOs based in Middle-East to maximize outreach for undereducated children. Technically, our common goal is to work on data collection and analytics for an offline game.

Have a look at Antura and the Letters’ pitch at the Techfugees Global Summit:

Originale article: https://techfugees.com/projects/techfugees-x-antura-and-the-letters-to-increase-the-refugee-child-literacy/

The game Antura and the Letters, the literacy and well-being project we have been working on for the last two years, has been selected as finalist for the Games For Change Awards 2018 in two categories: BEST LEARNING GAME and MOST SIGNIFICANT IMPACT.

You can also vote for the People’s Choice Award here.

This double nomination adds to the others international awards received by Antura:

• winner of EduApp4Syria competition to help Syrian kids that are out-of-school because of the conflict

• winner of Titanium Award as BEST SERIOUS GAME OF THE YEAR at Fun & Serious Games Festival 2017

We’ll be in New York City next week to present Antura at the Games For Change Festival, please contact us to meet there and have a coffee.

How is life without communication? How can we connect? Cry? Pray? Read? Learn? Love?

Language is the base to everything. Language in the way we can build nations and relations. We can make contracts and poems. Language is our soul. Our culture and our identity. Language is our humanity. A multilingual planet full of diversity is the living richness of our world.

This year, UNESCO commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its bold statement that ‘no discrimination can be made on the basis of language’, and celebrates its translation into more than 500 languages.

“Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status..”

Article 2, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

UNESCO reiterates its commitment to linguistic diversity and invites  to celebrate the day in as many languages as possible as a reminder that linguistic diversity and multilingualism are essential for sustainable development.. and  with the aim of preserving linguistic diversity and promoting mother tongue-based multilingual education.

Linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened as more and more languages  disappear. One language disappears on average every two weeks, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.

Nevertheless, progress is being made in mother tongue-based multilingual education with growing understanding of its importance, particularly in early schooling, and more commitment to its development in public life.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head.

If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”.

-Nelson Mandela

We are so proud to be a special part of this. Antura and the letters can help the 2 Millions Syrian refugee kids to learn how to read in Arabic, their Mother Language.

We are proud winners of the #EduApp4Syria contest. But we are even more proud of help people to discover their language through a videogame. A powerful tool with a huga potential thanks to the massive access to smartphones.

Now, we are searching new partners to develop other Languages to reach more children.  The new 2030 horizon about the educational and total literacy of the planet, its a dream we can achieve all together. It’s the SDG 4: Quality Education for all.

If we can dream it, we can make it happen! Wanna join us?

Antura and the Letters

• The feedback from the field test done in Jordan during summer 2017 is quite positive on both the literacy and the psycho-social well being sides, but still we have margin for improvement…

• … so we have been improving the game and we will release a new version in February 2018: the official announcement will happen during edtech event No Lost Generation together with the public distribution of the field test report. This will be the beginning of the communication and marketing campaign that we will run to reach the maximum number of Syrian refugees and other Arabic-speaking children!

• Last December Antura received the Titanium Award at the “Best Serious Game of the Year” at the Fun&Serious Games Festival in Bilbao

• Now the project priority shifts to scalability: we want to adapt the game to other languages/contexts in order to bring literacy to as many kids as possible, all over the world. The most promising opportunities for future versions are…

  • Darija (Morocco): with a Casablanca foundation we are studying the feasibility of a new version of Antura in which all storytelling and instructions are in Darija, while the curriculum and vocabulary won’t change: the game will teach Modern Standard Arabic

  • Spanish, English, Portuguese and French: we are setting up a partnership a spanish foundation specialized in Education to include Antura in their platform and distribute it in all the developing countries where they are active

  • Spanish (Perú): we are also part of an initiative to improve reading skills in Perú and in all South America

  • Spanish for foreigners: we are studying the feasibility of using Antura as a tool to help the integration of immigrants in Spain

• … but the main challenge is always about the funding: we won’t start any version until we have secure the budget to produce it!

• We will also keep promoting Antura as a tool for literacy at international events…

  • UNESCO Mobile Learning Week 2018: together with EduApp4Syria organizers we proposed a workshop to share our experience and study potential next steps.

  • Tehran Game Convention 2018: we’ll propose a talk about Antura to expand its success and impact in Middle-East.

ONE WORLD A MILLION STORIES

• The project did not really kick-off yet. After spending few months defining the business model in details we tried to find the right partners to make it happen but we could not find enough funding yet.

• We started discussing with UNESCO to have them supporting the project and potentially endorse it with their logo/name (short video presentation)… but we have no confirmation yet.

• Given the current difficulties in kicking off the project we decided to lower its priority until we’ll find the right opportunity to make it real!

OTHER PROJECTS

• We are setting up a partnership with a leading NGO focused on protecting the oceans, in order to reproduce in 3D all the sites in which they do research expeditions. Funders and anyone else (especially kids) will be able to dive and learn about the ecosystems in deep sea.

• Since September 21017 we are collaborating with the Digital Bros Game Academy in Milan (Italy): all their students will be grouped into teams and each group will develop their final project during few months… and 2 of the projects this year are in collaboration with VGWB: Home (about refugees and the reason why they are forced to leave their homes, more info in the Slack channel #game_home) and Wild Rescue (about the protection of wild species and the fight against poachers, more info in the Slack channel #game_wildrescue). The 2 projects will reach Beta stage in February and we will start looking for possible partners (mainly NGOs): the goal is to transform them from  “students project” to real games for impact and distribute them on the appropriate market!

About Us

B-VALUE (http://www.ship2b.org/b-value)

• This incubation program specifically designed for Spanish NGOs finished last October.

• We received 3000€ as part of the final “prizes” but the learning and networking opportunities were far more valuable!

BBVA MOMENTUM (https://www.momentum.bbva.com/en/)

• Acceleration program specifically designed for companies offering innovative and sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems in Colombia, USA (Texas only), Spain, Mexico and Turkey.

• The program ended in mid-December with a Pitch Day (in Spanish)… and you can watch VGWB pitch here.

COMMUNITY

• We are almost 200 in our Slack community! And we are working hard to let every member participate more and more…

• … and we started organizing our own “meetup” events every time we have the opportunity. The last one was in Paris in November (picture above)! Please feel free to organize your own meetups writing in #_vgwb_people Slack channel if you’re attending meetings, events or just travelling to other places in the world and would like to have a beer (or glass of water or just chat) with VGWB mates.