Meedan is collaborating with long-time partner Birmingham City University and academics at six institutions in Brazil with shared interests in the use of offline games in education contexts. The committee is planning a two-day pilot event in Rio de Janeiro in August 2023. 

Under Meedan’s Check Global Program, and organized across four participatory sessions, the partners will be designing event activities that explore themes common to Check Global - namely media literacy and misinformation, but approaching the learning experience through their research interests of offline gaming contexts, rather than the typical workshop, training, or internship methods. 

The pilot partly tackles the issue in many of Meedan’s partner countries, of engagement methods being affected by poor or unstable internet or power infrastructure, and issues of low digital inclusion for communities, organizations, or individuals. However, it also speaks to and explores interests in the use of offline games in their various forms for educational or communicative means. 

The event brings together these academic partners and their contacts in a rare opportunity to work together and network, but also to direct their work at, and potentially collaborate with, an audience of schoolteachers and their students. 

Our partners will host and deliver activities that they organize during the two-day event, such as: game ‘playtests’; workshops around transmediation, ‘unmaking’ and ‘remaking’ games according to new themes and narratives; using role-playing games to explore our themes. 

“This gives the team the opportunity to test the effectiveness of such educational approaches and their outputs, and observe the process, with a view to research outputs,” explains Dr. Dima Saber, Program and Impact Director at Meedan. 

In the short term, the hope is to share research findings at conferences such as the Brazilian Symposium on Games and Entertainment, in fall 2023. “Long term, there is hope that the pilot sparks an ongoing relationship between the partners, leading to further network events, published outputs, conferences, and/or joint research funding bids,” comments Dr. Jerome Turner, Lecturer at the Birmingham School of Media, and member of the Check Global research and impact assessment team. 

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7 academic research institutions in our organizing committee
25 academic / games developer partners and participants
25 education sector attendees (including teachers and their students) 

The partner organizations include:

• Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Fiocruz/Estácio de Sá
• Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, UFRGS
• Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, PUC-Rio
• Federal University of Minas Gerais, UFMG
• Federal University of Paraíba, UFPB  
• Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ

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