My Home Stars (The 5 STA-Z Boardgame)

The problem we are solving is the lack of accessible and quality learning resources for refugee students in Uganda. 

Our proposed solution is the 5 STA-Z, an academic boardgame that breaks down the Ugandan learning content into easily comprehensible and modularized packages allowing children to learn in a fun and engaging way. 

Global, millions of refugee children often miss out of school on arrival to their new homes in refugee camps after displacement. The 5 STA-Z has a huge potential to globally impact these children since the 5 STA-Z could easily be made available as a learning tool kit. 

For example, when the pandemic hit, thousands of refugee children in Uganda and across Africa had no access to online learning tools. Working with communities in Kyangwali refugee camp in Uganda, we produced about 200 packages of the 5 STA-Z which made home learning possible for more than 2000 refugee students.  

Today Uganda is home to more than 1.4 million refugees. About 60% of these are below the age of 18 and deserve access to education, yet more than 57% remain with no access to education. This is primarily due to a lack of enough resources such as classroom spaces and scholastic materials. 

The educational gap is even bigger within rural communities and refugee camps where there is a big shortage of teachers and learning resources as a result of the daily increasing numbers of refugee children. Refugee camp schools are often overcrowded with some accommodating up to 200 students under a single roof. Scholastic materials in the form of textbooks also remain scarce with a 1:8 textbook to student ratio (Uganda, MoE Education response plan, 2018).

Right now we are working with 8 primary schools in Uganda where we have been able to make the 5 STA-Z available to more than 4,000 primary school students. With school closures triggered by the pandemic, the 5 STA-Z has been a huge learning toolkit for many refugee teachers and learners in the Kyangwali refugee camp in Western Uganda.

Our proposed solution is the 5 STA-Z, a fun, collaborative, and competitive academic boardgame based on the Ugandan primary education curriculum. This innovation has been inspired by the idea that learning content could be broken down into gamified and easily digestible pieces of information that allow students to learn effectively.

Students will take on the role of both asking questions on the playing cards and answering them throughout the game. This can facilitate discussions among students and enforce learning via peer-to-peer interactions. 

The game consists of a board that can be played by up to 5 players, 500 playing cards summarizing each subject matter, dice and game pawns representing the 5 brightest stars in the galaxy.

 With game mechanics such as chance and jeopardy, children are able to challenge each other beyond the traditional education curriculum. During gameplay children have opportunities to also work in teams and smaller groups while helping each other and taking advantage of peer-to-peer learning. 

At the core, the 5 STA-Z not only aim to help students perform better in academics, but also to develop critical thinking and communicative skills.

We are primarily targeting refugee children who often struggle to get access to quality learning resources. More often when refugees arrive in camps, they need a lot of help including food to feed on and medical supplies. Although for many children, education becomes their biggest source of hope especially after leaving everything behind for their lives, it often gets ignored and not prioritized given that food and medical supplies end up being the most needed at the moment.  However, providing quality education to refugee children doesn’t only serve as a huge opportunity for a better future for these children, but to develop potential solutions for refugee challenges since many of these children could turn out to be great world leaders. 

In our approach, it has been important to understand that if we are to properly address the lack of education access within the refugee communities, we would need to create with refugees themselves. And this started with our founder Joel Baraka, who led the creation of the 5 STA-Z as a result of his lived experience. Joel, who is now pursuing his Bachelors in Civil Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up and attended primary school in Kyangwali refugee camp in western Uganda and has been instrumental in designing the 5 STA-Z and the work we do at My Home Stars. 

We have been intentionally working with the few qualified teachers within refugee camps across Uganda to better understand what it is like teaching within a refugee camp and what it might take to deliver innovative learning solutions that address education challenges. For example, all our five full-time game facilitators are refugee educators from the Kyangwali refugee camp. All these educators have been the lead at introducing the 5 STA-Z within our partner schools within refugee camp communities. This has not only simplified our work of making the 5 STA-Z as a learning resource to refugee children in Kyangwali, but has also been instrumental in helping us gather feedback from teachers and students necessary to keep improving our product.

 Additionally, we have been diligent at doing small-scale research as we continue to validate the impact the 5 STA-Z could have on the learning of children and their academic excellence. Between September and December of 2020, we conducted quantitative research to test whether children who had access to the 5 STA-Z as a learning tool would score high results in tests compared to those who had no access. A group of 90 refugee students was divided into two (control and treatment). Both groups were subjected to both pre- and post-test and at the end of the pilot, students who had access to the 5 STA-Z game packages had a 4.5 point average increase in their score compared to the learners who had no games (control group). 

 Today, the 5 STA-Z has been piloted in 8 primary schools and more than 4,800 learners have been able to benefit from the product. Our goal is to continue working with communities and local organizations within some of the hardest to reach areas such as refugee camps to make learning more accessible.

The Challenge we are solving lack of access to quality education as a result of learning resources to refugees and children from rural communities. Our goal is to innovate low-cost but highly effective learning tools that engage students to improve their academic performances in school and help build their lives towards a brighter future. It also alleviates the burden of teachers in managing overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms with its peer-to-peer learning approach. By designing an easy-to-use and children-centered learning tool, we are aligning our solution to better serve the under-resourced refugee community.

We have been developing and testing the 5 STA-Z learning package within various communities and truly believe that we are at a stage where we need to rigorously grow the product and make it available to more communities in need. At the moment, we are working with 8 primary schools and one orphanage in Uganda. 

One of our major goals this year is to introduce the game package into 3 refugee camps, serve 50 primary schools and reach at least 10,000 student users. 

There is so much feedback and insights that we have gained from working with our partner schools and local organizations. This will be very instrumental as we implement and scale the use of the 5 STA-Z to more communities and make it available to more children that could hugely benefit from the 5 STA-Z. 

We are adopting the innovative approach of combining learning and gameplay. It is a true observation that children love to play with their peers at school, whether its sports and other games. However, most games and activities that students engage in school do not reinforce academic learning and not all students can strive based on the limited learning resources like textbooks. 

The traditional learning style in primary schools in Uganda is characterized by disengaged students in classrooms with teachers as the main and only source of knowledge, and students struggle to regurgitate information from textbooks or notes in exams, which led to low passing rates and students dropping out of schools. 

The 5 STA-Z can allow students to learn the academic content effectively in a gameplay format. This innovation is an easy-to-use learning tool that facilitates a child-centered approach to learning. Another equally important benefit of the game is that students can develop soft skills like communication and critical thinking skills by playing the 5 STA-Z with their peers.

Right now, we serve about 4800 students in 8 schools. 

In the next one year, we hope to be working with 50 primary schools with more than 10,000 users.

In five years, we hope to serve at least 1,000,000 students across Uganda. 

We have been conducting small-scale research using some of the proven statistical models such as difference-in-difference where two student groups (treatment and control) are identified and their results analyzed. The second model we have tried is SPSS which is another statistical data analysis model used to see if there is any significance the game is creating using the P-values. 

We have also been actively engaging teachers and students and collecting feedback from both as a way to involve them in the process of product improvement. Their opinions will help us create a product that best fits their needs. 

Most teachers, especially those from refugee camps, have found the game useful especially with managing large and overcrowded classrooms given that students can be divided into smaller groups to make learning happen in a gameplay. They are expressing gratitude and praise for the game so far while also providing constructive feedback that we need to further develop the game.

4 full time and core team members and a team of 5 contracted and full time educators who facilitate and teach how to use the 5 STA-Z within every community the 5 STA-Z gets introduced in.

Joel Baraka (founder), has plenty of experience in game design and he has the lived experience of growing up in refugee camps where learning resources are scarce. While also a great listener, he is a smart and passionate leader and strives to contribute back to his community. Anson Liow (product engineer) grew up in Malaysia and has been a volunteer teacher for refugees back home as well. His experience in creating social impact drives his work and effort at My Home Stars. He is also highly skilled with game design and packaging of the 5 STA-Z. Nelson Mugambwa (project manager) has been a crucial member of the team who handles our on-the-ground operations. He is experienced with sourcing local producers in Uganda and timely assembling and distributing the 5 STA-Z learning packages. 

We are a grassroots organization led by Joel Baraka who grew up as a refugee in the Kyangwali refugee camp. Our leadership team consists of women and men of different nationalities and backgrounds, and more importantly, our approach to building our team is to identify people with the right skills and core values. By adopting this approach, we can create a dynamic team of highly motivated individuals that are passionate to serve others and to be creating an impact on people’s lives. And My Home Stars was founded to mainly serve refugee communities and the 5 STA-Z initially developed to serve refugees, we hope to expand and serve children across Uganda and later across Africa.

We believe the funding will allow us to scale our impact to more under-served communities like refugees and orphans across Uganda. We have been fortunate to win smaller grants from various programs and raise some money from GoFundMe campaigns which all have been helpful in pushing the 5 STA-Z at it’s early stages. 

The funding we shall receive would allow us to rapidly scale the 5 STA-Z, establishing systems to track its progress and continuously making it readily available for communities that need the resource most. More importantly, the connections we gain from interacting with like-minded peers and mentors will be very beneficial to our growth as an organization. Strategic advising from professionals or entrepreneurs in the social impact sector can help us brainstorm solutions and implement change for our team to better execute our ideas. 

Most of us on the team have some skills with monitoring and evaluation; however, as we expand, there will be a need for more experienced personnel to help us measure our product’s impact and identifying areas of improvement. 

Making sure that we have sustainable sources of income to continue running our operations will be crucial as we expand. We would appreciate mentorship on how best to pitch to potential foundations and philanthropists with a mission aligned to ours. 

And when it comes to product-market fit, we shall need mentorship from professionals since we are interested in expanding to various communities and countries. Different users from different parts of the world can react and use products differently, having experts to advise us on how best to approach this will be instrumental for our success and expansion. 

Global organizations such as UNHCR, Save The Children, UNICEF are of huge interest to us. All these organizations are serving similar populations like ours. Partnering with them means helping each other and striving to achieve the UN sustainable goals. Usually, larger NGOs that have established a great presence in refugee communities across Uganda and many African countries will provide us the “client base” that we seek. With their expertise in the education/humanitarian sector, these organizations can also provide us with advice and ideas that will help us run operations more effectively in the long run.

Led by a refugee in Joel Baraka, My Home Stars is qualified for the Andan Prize because we strive to bring equitable access to education for refugee primary school students across Uganda. With the common language of "play", our proposed solution of the 5 STA-Z will be able to engage all students without discrimination. On top of developing students' understanding of the academic content, the 5 STA-Z can develop students' communication, critical-thinking, and other important life skills. 

No we do not qualify.