MAHA

MAHA EduGame for toddler and children to learn ESQ and IQ

As an emerging economic power, ASEAN countries are still struggling to be an inclusive society where people are not discriminated against. In Indonesian, there is subtle discrimination that usually occurs is the restriction to age, gender, and religion in hiring. Moreover, Indonesian parents do not teach their children respect and tolerance for other people who are different. Therefore, we can see bullying in high school orientation programs. The low emotional quotient of our children today will affect our human future and our future generation. Thus, we need to provide today's children with positive information that will educate them to be tolerant, empathetic, compassionate, and respectful of others who are different. Children are like sponges. They soak up everything that surrounds them, whether it is good or bad, believing that it will contribute to their education and make them who they are as adults. Based on this premise, the best time to teach a person respect, kindness, empathy, and spirituality is when their brain is at its highest stage of development. Here we would like to suggest games for children (6 - 9 years old) and preteen (10 - 12 years old).  

MAHA Edugame wants to help society achieve equality and a peaceful community. The games would like to offer ESQ and some additional settings for IQ. For ESQ, we would like to teach empathy, discrimination, respect, sexuality, and the existence of God. In IQ we would like to teach basic math and science.

Indonesian pedagogy no longer teaches children with attitude (tata krama). The Indonesian curriculum now focuses only on religious education, nationalism, and tangible knowledge such as math, Indonesian, and English. The non-tangible skills such as manners are not the responsibility of the formal educational institution, but of the parents. Sadly, parents think that educating their children in all areas is the school's responsibility. Parents who are already struggling to put food on the table and pay for their children's school do not have the time, energy, and resources to teach their children manners and emotional intelligence. This gap is reflected in children's behavior toward their peers. Instead of being respectful, tolerant, and empathetic toward peers who are indifferent, they bully. This is because the child thinks that indifferent peers are a problem that they need to get rid of. When these bullying children grow up, they become agents of discrimination in society. This problem causes us to educate young people to respect, tolerance and empathy, which are part of the emotional mental quotient. Under the brand MAHA Edugames we want to provide children with playful education.

For the first launch, MAHA will initially focus on Indonesia, using Indonesian, English and the vernacular language Javanese. Indonesia is currently home to about 277 million people, including 80 million children (source: BPS,2018).  Since the Indonesian language is already well established in society, relying on Indonesian as a medium is sufficient for the MAHA product to be adopted by children in Indonesia through their smartphones.

On the premise that parents focus on their work to feed their family. Therefore, parents do not have time to educate their children. As a result, schools bear the entire responsibility of educating children. Since the quality of schools in ASEAN countries, especially in Indonesia, is very poor, children retrieve the knowledge they did not get from school by playing games, interacting with their peers, and interacting with the outside world through the Internet.

With the existence of MAHA Edugames, we provide children with the knowledge that is not taught in school. MAHA is a mobile game that can be played together with peers. Without children's knowledge, MAHA teaches them about ESQ and IQ. We assume that with the help of educational games, children like to learn new things and build things that are useful to society. An investment in the young mind is an investment in the future of humanity.

The Octava Social Innovation Challenge aims to find educational technology solutions that improve learning outcomes for underserved K-12 students in Southeast Asia while being affordable and accessible. The MAHA Edugames provides accessible and affordable educational product solutions for children. Through the MAHA product, we help K-12 students in Indonesia learn reading, writing, math, and social-emotional skills. MAHA Edugames can also help students beyond Indonesia by incorporating local language into our games. We plan to expand to Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam after the launch of MVP MAHA. With MAHA, we can increase learning opportunities, quality, and motivation for children to learn. MAHA can be downloaded as an application so that children who do not have internet access can play it offline. As we continue to develop MAHA, we plan to expand the content and theme of learning to include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Because we need more people in STEM, to find a new solution for our changing environment due to global warming.

In addition, MAHA will make it easier for teachers, schools, and parents by providing children with trustworthy and non-violent content that contrasts with existing online games on the market that are rich in violence and sexual content.

MAHA Edugame presented by ZAKKI under Sintesis Syariah Indonesia. The MAHA Team Lead is Chairperson of ZAKKI and Director of Sintesis Syariah Indonesia, Arifah Suparni.

The development of games that include 2D, 3D, and augmented reality is no longer a new technology in today's world. However, the application of these technologies is still limited to entertainment purposes. The potential of this technology has not yet been optimally exploited for educational and research purposes. With the project MAHA we would like to harness the potential of gaming technology for children's learning.

The fact that discrimination and racism still exist in our modern world shows that something is wrong in our education system and society. Today's children will be adults in 10 to 15 years. They are the generation that will shape our future world. If we, as a society, once again fail to educate our children as we have done in our current generation. Then we can be sure that the future of humanity will be bleak. However, if we as a society do the right thing today by raising our children with manners, respect, tolerance, empathy, and altruism. We can certainly be optimistic that they will take care of us and our planet in our short future.

Since MAHA is a medium, MAHA can be filled with various educational content tailored to our different ethnicities, cultures, and languages. We can also indirectly save the indigenous language from extinction by teaching it to our children so that they learn it and become familiar with it. MAHA MVP is a 2D game, MAHA is scalable and can be used with our advanced augmented reality technology.

MAHA is still in the design process. And upon completion of high fidelity development. We are expected to develop it by hiring a 2D game developer for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
 
Prior to the UIUX design process, we conducted user research with children and parents who have children in India, Indonesia, the US, and Argentina. Based on the user research, parents confirm that their children are better able to adapt to a new technology and they expect their children to learn manners and respect as well as math and motor skills through the game.

As an MVP, MAHA plans to launch the 2D games first, which will be offered in two languages - English and Indonesian. MAHA MVP will be the Progressive Web App (PWA) and also the mobile application for Android/ IOS. In the next iteration, we will then add more features and language options, such as Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Thai or Vietnamese.
After we launch MAHA1.0, we expect to develop the game in 3D and augmented reality (AR). The 3D games will be available in PWA and mobile apps. For the AR, we could consider mobile apps only.

Children are like sponges. They soak up everything that surrounds them, whether it is good or bad, believing that it will contribute to their education and shape them in adulthood. Based on this premise, the best time to teach a person respect, kindness, empathy, and spirituality is when their brain is at its highest stage of development, which is from toddlers to teenagers. Here we would like to introduce the idea of games for children (6 - 9) to teenagers (10 - 12 years).

Moreover, the main characteristic of children is to play. Children do not want to do anything that is not entertaining and bores their minds. So the best way to educate children is to teach them subliminal and subtle lessons. We are in the age of technological acceleration. There are many entertainment media that attract children more than learning for school. There are countless tools to teach and learn knowledge in an entertaining way, one of which is a game.

A game not only sharpens the user's cognitive skills, but also makes them addicted. Although games have negative effects, there are also many positive effects. Games are just a tool, just as a knife is a tool for cutting or killing. If we exploit the potential benefits of games. We can teach a person something subliminally. Because people tend to avoid something that addresses them head on or challenges their current beliefs.

The games would like to offer ESQ and some additional settings for IQ. For ESQ, we would like to teach empathy, discrimination, respect, sexuality, and the existence of God. In IQ we would like to teach basic math skills such as addition, reduction, multiplication, and division.

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The ideal measurement is to conduct a pre-assessment before using MAHA Edugames compared to after playing MAHA. The pre-assessment collects data on what children perceive about a particular topic, in addition to what parents and/or teachers tell us about the children's own abilities. Then we can ask children to play MAHA for a year and then do the post-assessment to measure the impact of the MAHA games. In addition, we will likely quantify progress based on the number of children using our products and the level at which they play the games. We will then use the online data from the MAHA products to conduct random user research by interviewing the children, conducting surveys, or interviewing the children's parents and teachers to obtain comprehensive data online and offline.

In the first year after the launch of MVP MAHA, we expect the platform MAHA to be used by children in Java and the island of Bali. Then, as the games gain popularity, children in Sumatra, Borne and Sulawesi will pick up the sentiment. Followed by the children in the Lesser Sunda Islands, Moluccas and Papua. For MVP, we focus mainly on social and emotional intelligence.

Over the next three years, we plan to add more content features and language options. The content will be math and geography subjects. Language options will include Indonesian, English, Malay, Thai, Tagalog, Viet, and some other vernacular languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, etc.

And in the next five years, we expect to introduce the AR feature. As we have added more school subjects, we expect that MAHA can be used as a homework help and also as an examination tool for some subjects in the curriculum.

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Access to talent is our main problem. There is a lack of talent that knows how to develop games in Indonesia. If we hire international talents, we cannot afford their salary. Also, we need cloud technology as a database for the product so we can access it anytime, anywhere. The cloud technology itself is not cheap, so we need enough capital to finance this technology.

Until now, Indonesia law has not recognize a corporate form for social enterprises.Therefore, in 2018, Arifah Suparni founded Sintesis Syariah Indonesia incorporation, which is partly owned by ZAKKI. Sintesis Syariah Indonesia is the legal form of social enterprise for MAHA. ZAKKI was founded by Arifah Suparni in 2017. ZAKKI itself is a non-profit institution that focuses on empowering marginalized economic groups, especially the elderly and people with disabilities. The establishment of ZAKKI is based on the understanding that basic human rights should be equal in all communities. However, it is being implemented in phases to optimize the organization's benefits. In this phase, ZAKKI focuses on empowering and strengthening the elderly who are economically aged. 

  Indonesia does have a national motto of "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" ("Unity in Diversity"). However, as a nation, we are not able to implement unity in diversity. Indonesia is prone to violence around ethnic and religious issues. The root of violence is always discrimination. The subtle discrimination that usually takes place is the restriction of age and gender in hiring. In addition, there is also explicit discrimination based on race and religion when accepting jobs. As a social entrepreneur, Arifah wants to carry out non-discriminatory hiring and transform the diversity of human resources into the state of peaceful organization. Faced with this reality, we feel the need to work to transform the causes of violence and violent incidents into peace by simply establishing an inclusive organization that leaves no one behind and performs discrimination-free hiring. At ZAKKI, we provide equal opportunities for volunteer work or employment to all people regardless of age, gender, color, race, creed, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, political beliefs, or disability that does not interfere with the performance of essential job functions. All issues related to volunteering are based on an individual's ability to perform the task and their commitment to the mission and needs of ZAKKI.

Because we need to educate people outside of ZAKKI, we have initiated MAHA Edugames to promote anti-discrimination and anti-racism.

There are 6 volunteers that doing UIUX Design and 1 full-time product owner.

Arifah Suparni is the founder and chairwoman of ZAKKI Foundation. She has more than eight years of experience in the for-profit sector and about three years of work experience in the non-profit sector. She is building ZAKKI through bootstrapping and leading the organization to further growth with various ramifications that address social concerns of the elderly and people with disabilities, victims of sexual misconduct, anti-discrimination, anti-racism, anti-corruption, free access to knowledge, and crowd-sharing/in-kind donations. Arifah is building the company's culture template into an agile, transparent and inclusive work environment for all. Arifah is a strategic thinker and innovative leader who uses her positive attitude and tireless energy to encourage others to work towards a common goal - building an inclusive society. She draws inspiration from the community on a daily basis and is always inspired to solve an existing problem in society.  

The UIUX designer volunteer team is led by Dian Anindya, an experienced UIUX designer at Traveloka, one of the unicorn tech startups in Indonesia. The other 5 UIUX designers are novice UIUX designers. So all 5 of them are closely supervised by Dian.

Arifah Suparni has developed ZAKKI from an abstract idea, a product that can help and empower the impoverished older people, into an online product that can now be found at www.zakki.org. Arifah conducted the user research herself by interviewing ZAKKI's potential donors and users. With no UIUX design background, Arifah designed the mock-up and delivered the prototype of ZAKKI herself, assisted by 1 graphic designer. The first prototype of ZAKKi can be found at the URL https://shorturl.at/noGXY

The idea of MAHA was born from the compassion Arifah feels for the immigrants from ASEAN countries in Australia after a friend who immigrated to Australia told her about it. It was triggered by Arifah's experience of being a victim of bullying in elementary school (K12) and the discrimination Arifah faced when she applied for a job as a recent college graduate based on her ethnicity and her personal decision not to wear a hijab.

MAHA Edugame is presented by ZAKKI under Sintesis Syariah Indonesia as a social enterprise that aims to help society achieve equality and a peaceful community. The MAHA Team Lead is the chairperson of ZAKKI and director of Sintesis Syariah Indonesia, Arifah Suparni.

The key component of MAHA product at the current stage is funding to acquire human resources and tools. We need Game Developer talent and Artificial Intelligent programmer (if possible). While in the tools side, we need cloud services and the game developer programming tools. From the Octava and MIT Solve, we are expecting we can get assistance and help for funding to hire the talent, cloud service credit and purchase the tools.

For the partnership, even if we can not secure the funding, we are also welcome with the in-kind donation help in the form of developer talent for Game Developer and Artificial Intelligent Developer.