Solution description

Our solution is to create and offer a platform for students of university or higher levels, this platform will be 100% online, focused on delivering social interactions, giving more importance to the avatars, personalization and forums. Educrate is a platfrom based on gamification, so people will learn with some aspects based on videogames, but not directly playing them. They will be earning points for each activity and increising their level in relationship with the XP they earn.

Solution context

The solution comes from the necessity to solve a problem we are facing, the impossibility to assist physically to school, we now pass most of our day sitting in front of a computer, and it is necessary to do this process a bit more dynamic and pleasant, especially for university students, who have a high rate of abandoned studies because they feel very monotonous and despaired, so our finality is to help these people to completed their course in a more friendly and less stressed way.

Solution target group

Our solution is aimed towards students and teachers in higher education areas (college, university, master). We chose this because this target audience needs to have a certain level of technology understanding to be able to interact with the platform. The aim though is that it can be intuitive so that the platform doesn’t need to have a whole lot of documentation for it to be used in a practical manner.

Solution impact

As stated before, this platform impacts the area of higher education and can later on help in creating a more interactive and fun experience globally. Since gamification is a fresh market and, even though there are companies that offer this service with a certain price, we want to implement this first in developing countries where technological services could be too expensive and make this a bit more economical. To measure this, we will of course see the amount of users the platform gets and compare this with the amount of teachers and students that there are in a certain country or city. Also we would measure the times students log in into our platform to verify if our solution is actually causing students to be more engaged in their classes, or if absenteeism is still a problem.

Solution tweet text

Application of gaming metaphors in non game contexts to influence behavior, improve motivation and enhance engagement through an interactive digital interface.

Solution innovativeness

The idea of a platform where students and teachers can create and do activities is not new, however, what makes us different, is that we will focus on a specific kind of students, master students, with gamification activities dedicated to them, and forums, where they can ask their doubts in a respectful and mature way, the platform will also offer a more complete personalization to the avatar, and will encourage students to make a better organization of their time, so that way they can be able to deliver all the requests on the platform. 

In the markets there are already platforms for university and upper levels, but none of them offer a gamification and use of technological tools for them, since most of the gamification tools are focused on children. So what we did was adapt those platforms to a more mature gamification, but with the most important and useful characteristics of it.

Solution transferability

Since we are starting to use this application in developing countries, then for the moment the application is set to target schools in these regions. This is because other platforms that exist already gained a market in highly developed countries and this could cause a small problem for us in the future with more competition and being stuck with unused and unreliable resources. To extend this idea, we wanted to also try in the future an interactive, lightweight, 2D campus that serves as a digital environment for students to interact with (Like habbo or other famous Chat MMOs).

Solution sustainability

This project will be offered to private and public schools who are interested in an innovative platform which can offer a more dynamic and organized environment to the students. The schools will be paying annually for our services, and we, in exchange, will be offering maintenance and answering to all their doubts, as well as the initial preparation for teachers and students.

Our plan for the mid and long term is to be creating a name through the community, so that way, several institutions get interested in the service and, at the same time, give us retroalimentacion to constantly improving the platform with new ideas and functions.

Solution team work

As a team, we worked pretty well, we helped each other every time we could and we were patient with the problems that were creating during the process, it wouln'd be bad if we were a team again.