Spread the game and the use of gamification as an instrument of social inclusion

“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I’ll remember, engage me and I’ll learn”. It’s a frase pronounced in 1700 by Benjamin Franklin, one of the United States’ founding fathers, that already at that time had identified the importance of building a society around the theme of involvement and based on the demand of wanting to do as opposed to having to do.

This is precisely the principle on which the methodologies that incorporate the digital and the game (also and above all in non-playful situations) are based, such as the technique of gamification and digital storytelling. Both present an element of innovation, today more important and necessary than ever.

Spread the Game arises precisely from the need to explore innovative educational methods aimed at promoting a methodology that has as a theme social inclusion through entertainment tools and the use of free applications.

The project involves four European countries – Spain, Greece, Slovenia and Italy – and provides for an exchange of good practices, useful for understanding their use in various national contexts and the impact they create during and after their implementation.

These intervention methods, enhancing creativity, motivation, concentration, memory, learning in the form of a game, and can be very useful for addressing the issue of social inclusion in its various facets.

This is the case of video games that deal with the issue of bullying, migration, disability that become spokespersons of the concepts of “integration”, “inclusion” and promote understanding and diversity.

A methodology that particularly struck us is the one used in the free “Inclusion Bridges” App, created with the aim of promoting social inclusion among young people through involvement in a game adventure, where the player fights the monsters of exclusion by building “bridges of inclusion”.

The game App was created according to the principle of Edutainment (fusion of education and entertainment), that is, combining educational content with the dimension of games and fun. The synergy between the training process and the game makes use of the advantages related to interactivity, connectivity and multimediality of the digital world considered as a cognitive production environment suitable for encouraging learning through emotions.

Written by H.R.Y.O.