eLearning Inside News has
recently posted an interesting article covering the groundbreaking value proposition
of FazGame (MakeGame in
Portuguese), a Brazilian-based edtech company.
“Being a country of
great contrast, while a majority of the nation’s children and youth have access
to education, in some of Brazil’s poorest neighborhoods dropout rates remain
high. FazGame has found out that Serious Games creation may be one way
to increase engagement and decrease the dropout rate in the nation’s most
at-risk school districts.”
FazGame is an interdisciplinary platform that offers a fun and intuitive
environment for students to create, share and publish educational storytelling
games. The authoring tool is associated with the FazGame Portal, which
allows publishing and access to the games at any time and place.
It does not require any
prior design or programming knowledge: players can create “point and click” narrative
games, composed by missions and scenes. This type of game allows the selection
of interface scenarios, characters and objects, and ease insertion of
educational content.
Carla Seltzer, FazGame founder, had previously worked for another startup, developing
entrepreneurship education methodologies for kids.
“We were working on
two projects at the same time: a point-and-click entrepreneurship education game
and an eLearning for teachers,” she said in her interview to eLearning Inside
News. “Then, I had the idea of FazGame to develop a platform where
anyone could create point-and-click games with educational content to help
spread the use of games in schools.”
“The biggest project
we have run here in Brazil is in a Rio de Janeiro municipality, with public
schools in high-risk areas,” she proceeds. “These schools generally have
students with lower grades and higher dropout rates, but if these students
receive additional and engaging activities, they are more inclined to stay at
school and succeed.”
“Games motivate
students because they are an interactive activity, where they can be proactive
and make decisions. FazGame also uses language that students are used to
and enjoy. When we include the creation component we empower these students.
Generally, in the beginning, students think they are not able to create a game.
Then, they start using the platform and discussing the project with their
groups, and they even don’t notice when the class time is finished as they are
so engaged in the creation process. We have an example of a group of 12-14
years old students from a public school from Rio Grande do Sul that created a
fiscal education game. The result was so positive that they were invited to present
their concept to the largest conference on game science hosted in Brazil.”
Challenging 10-17
year old students to create their own games and tell their own stories, FazGame
brings together teachers and students in a collaborative process of experiential
learning. There are already over 200 educational institutions that have the use of the platform in their curriculum, reaching more than 22 thousand students.
