Antura & the Letters

A free mobile game solution to teach literacy and support psychosocial wellbeing of refugee children

Antura addresses the challenge of literacy teaching and psychosocial wellbeing among the displaced children population, without regular access to schools. There is a lack of educative solution adapted to refugee settings (camp, mobility, precarious situation in host countries), in particular in the mother languages of populations impacted by the crisis in Middle East.

The approach is to deploy free, open source, solutions based on mobile gaming technology. A pilot version,  Antura & the Letters  - Arabic, was designed as an intervention tool in the Syrian refugee crisis. It was funded by the international EduApp4Syria initiative.  Since March 2018 the final version is available worldwide on mobile (Android and iOS) and on PC. By May of 2018 Antura had reached over 50,000 users mainly on Android phones in Middle East.

Our goal is to version the game in other typical refugee population languages as Kurdish or languages identified as a priority by UNICEF.

Some of the Antura solution characteristics:

• Adapted to refugee situation. Antura is free, accessible on mobile (a critical tools that the large majority of refugee families gets), weight less than 100meg (easy to download)
• Autonomous. As the typical user is a children out of school, the game must be playable without adult (ie teacher). But Antura is also used as complementary tool in classroom
• A final quality in competition with entertainment game. Antura is a full 3D game, graphically competitive, developed by industry veterans.  Lot of energy was dedicated to generate motivation and keep the children engage
• The pedagogical goal is to help players acquire the most basic skills of literacy. Letters, phonemes, syllable, spelling, and some vocabulary.

A broad impact evaluation was conducted in Jordan for the Arabic pilot. It was organized by an independent impact study agency and funded by All Children Reading and UNICEF. The most important part of it took place from July to October 2017 in Jordan and involved several groups of 300 children living in refugee camps. The result demonstrates the positive impact on the two aspects: literacy and psychosocial well-being. Also, the evaluation helped to improve the pedagogical and usability of the game. The final report is available here https://allchildrenreading.org/resources/antura-letters-impact-technical-evaluation/

Another strength of Antura is the deployment method. By crossing the data from UNHCR about refugees population locations, and the demographics tools in digital campaign tools (ie Facebook, Google adword, Youtube, etc.) we are able to reach out families at a large scale for a very low budget (Between 2 to 10 cents by installation). And to eventually adapt the campaign in real time.

The Antura initiative consortium is composed of the Cologne Game Lab TH Köln (institute of the Applied Sciences University of Cologne) and Video Games Without Borders (Spanish non profit organization). It is completed by partners case by case, depending of the region and the language. The versioning work already started, for instance a Pashto version in collaboration with Canadian-Afghan NGO. We will increase the impact in MENA by versioning Antura in others refugees typical mother tongues.

The context and the core audience make Antura unique.  Designed as an intervention tool in refugee crisis with a strong user centered approach, these constraints framed the technology: mobile based, optimized and easy to download, previous generation phones, run offline, etc.  On the content side, the project needed to establish an approach to keep engagement of children without supervision. The game based learning methodology in Antura is innovative (to be published in the ECGBL 2018 proceedings). The educational content is integrated in the core gameplay loop, at a micro level. It is an application of the stealth learning principle. 

Compared to many digital educational solutions, Antura has no choice than being fully technological. As evoked in previous sections, the autonomous nature of usage on the field implies it. As a complementary point, we should mention the “professor” aspect. Antura embodies an algorithm, the “professor”, that never appears to the children immersed in her ludo-narrative experience. This professor generates the content, gameplay and educational wise, of each mini game or activity the player is doing. Numerous parameters, as the source of past failures, are taken in account in this generative process

• Reach between 400 000 to 1,2 million users for the Arabic version, depending on the fund collected for the current digital campaign
• Support our partners in the deployment of the Pashto version in Afghanistan
• Launch the development of complementary versions for the Middle East crisis, at least Kurdish
• Fund a bilingual version, for the integration of refugees in host countries. The best candidates are Learn German and Learn Turkish for Arabic and Kurdish
• Experiment a version in classroom with tools for the teachers.  Best candidate: a Spanish version

The main objective of Antura is to reach as much as children as possible, and contribute to promote literacy among the most fragile populations. Our role will progressively shift from making new versions to support teams, as the Pashto one. The original core team will focus on the knowledge sharing aspect and the optimization of the development process for the different initiatives. We will also assist the new versions in their communication process to improve the field impact.  Even with a conservative approach we can forecast millions of users in the next 3 years.

We use several channels to reach refugees.

• -When possible, the most efficient one is to address directly the family through digital campaign, based on UNHCR data on refugee locations
• -Social media community rising and management (Antura FB pages)
• -Refugees forum, groups, pages
• -More traditional PR campaign in digital and paper press in countries with refugees
• -And communication toward of field NGOS

The retention is motivated by the children themselves and many motivational levers are integrated in the design.

50 000 users download the game since the release of the Arabic open beta last year.  We have around 9 000 monthly users.  

The independent impact evaluation done in Jordan, without any other form of education than the game, show progress in literacy and psychosocial well-being.  The beta version was greatly improve since last year and we should expect even better results for the current available version.

We expect 400 000 to 1.2 millions news users in the next 12 months. Several millions in the next 3 years. The main connection will be through the community, either on the field or on social media.  It helps to improve and react to the needs.

In the Arabic pilot project, we developed partnerships, framework, design methodologies, production processes, and experiential knowledge on the best ways to reach the refugee population. The field test results, the awards Antura received, the current community support (6000 folowers on FB and 50K install) give the project maturity, credibility and confidence in the future objectives.

Antura initiative is led by two organizations without profit needs (A public university Lab and a non-profit organization).  We can assume the cost of support for the existing version(s) in our normal budgets. The needs are linked to the scaling: versioning in new language, deployment in new countries, reinforcement of current communication for existing version, creating bilingual version for the integration of refugees in host countries, version for adults or for specific population (dyslexia disorder). The core model is to get fund by institution, contest or grant.  We also develop partnership with universities and NGOs ready to develop the new versions on their own, without extra cost.  Finally, Video Game Without Borders launches this year a crowd funding campaign to support communication to the refugees and versioning.

Solve could be a network boost. We are looking for academic, institution and NGO partners to work on new versions of Antura.  From the experience of the current versioning in Pashto with Canadian NGO and Academic the budget of development could be lower to small amount if you get the right partner for the educational approach, the development and the evaluation process.  And the potential funding from Solve can help for the incompressible expenses. 

• The quality of the language expert in literacy. It seems obvious but from the experience of the Arabic pilot, we may need a mixt of educational science expert and field teachers with some notion of the use of digital learning. In the Kurdish case it may need networking and recruitment.    
• The complexity of the evaluation process. Even if the Arabic version proved it efficiency, each language needs its own impact evaluation.  The access to the families and children in the region we target are sometimes complex and need to hire people on the field.