Playing House

Technology is changing this world and the skills we need to develop ourselves and how we interact with society. What's being taught in schools in Latin America hasn't changed much since the beginning of the 20th century. We’re developing soft skills to make up for that gap, and we do it with a game-based learning methodology. Playing House is building soft skills gyms where people develop empathy, resilience, teamwork and other skills while having fun. This has a huge impact on inclusion, collaboration and pro-social behavior. The development of this skills in pre-adolescents and teenagers can completely change the way the see the world with just a few hours a week of extra-curricular activities. We love with the idea of making cities, countries and the world a much caring, supportive and friendly place and we believe that better social relationships will improve our economy.

We’re solving the soft skills gap in Peru, and we’re looking to engage at a regional level. Peru and Latin America have experienced hard times (financial crisis, war and terrorism), and as third-world countries we pushed our development anyway we could, no matter what. Those cold decisions left a mark in the social fiber and left a lot of individualism. Now that we are developing countries, we need to focus on strengthening our social capital and work more as a big holistic team. That means being more inclusive and collaborative. This affects every member of the society, but most of all the ones that depend on this to work: people being in precarious situations. The PNUD has estimated that 38% of the population of Latin America is susceptible to any type of crisis; that means more than 200 million people.

The inability of the education system to adapt to this new day and age has caused this gap. Research indicates that soft skills are highly valued and rewarded by employers, yet development of these skills is generally absent from curricula. That’s the huge leverage our solution has. We’ll give something business need to improve a social problem.

We are working for people living in Lima. We have 4 different group of ages: 7-17, 18-26, 27-65 and 65+. We offer them the benefits of the development of soft skills they value the most such as: a better relationship parents-sons, better peer relationships, improved regulation of anxiety and stress, improved performance under pressure, improved boss-employee communication, improved leadership capabilities, better grandparent-grandsons relationships, etc. On one hand our COO has worked in a school for over 5 years, having in charge over 500 students a year, getting to know the stories and problematics. On the other hand, our CEO has worked in corporate businesses over 7 years, getting to know the problematic within the organizations he participated in. Our methodology starts with an assessment and a workout plan, that way we confirm exactly what the student is expecting.

We offer a programs and workshops for soft skills development in a gym-type center dedicated for this. We’ve also done workshops ad-hoc in organizations that hired us. The programs go for 2 hours a week and are exclusively dictated by trained psychologist from our staff.

The methodology is based upon 4 innovative educational approaches: 1. Game-based learning; 2. Collaborative learning; 3. Competency-based learning; 4. Active learning.

The simplest way to explain it is that we make students play specific games and chat about the outcome of the activity. In the conversation we’ll stress important details and share techniques, in order to maximize learning. Students learn from their experience, from their peers and from what the psychologist has to offer. It is an experiential and amusing way to learn more about empathy, respect, assertiveness, etc. We’ve curated a game library (which is constantly being updated) according to the skills that every game has. We select the appropriate game to use based on what skills need to be developed in a particular session.

The methodology has been developed since 2014 with tests in school students, teachers and parents. Recently in the 1Q of 2018 we implemented our first pilot as a summer activity for teenagers between 13 and 17 years old. From that firs pilot we’ve continued with our program implement new games and upgrades. Our focus right now is improving the user experience, as most of our efforts were dedicated to producing results in soft skill improvement.

What we weren’t expecting was the demand for talks about subjects such as Social-Emotional Learning, Use of Videogames at Home, etc. Talks have developed into a new service we’re offering that matches perfectly with the social impact we have as an objective.

The main problem education itself faces in modern times is how to adapt to this fast changing world. How effective are the current Latin America education systems in giving the tools people will need 20 years from now? We’ve combined two innovative educational methodologies to give people the main skill you need when facing uncertainty, the ability to know and handle yourself and others. We do this in a new and more effective way.

We live in the ed-tech industry and our technical development in the theory and practice of educational approaches to learning. We combine 4 innovative methodologies to develop soft skills in a unique way.

A result of our service is that people develop their empathy, which is the skill to relate to other people with different points of view and cultural backrounds. That’s a basic tool for teamwork and being collaborative. If I can relate to others, it’s natural that I’ll be willing to involve them in a better way. Soft skills make people communicate and cooperate better.

This year we’ve helped over 200 people, and we’re planning to attend over 800 next year. By 2020 we’ll be heading to help over 4000 people a year and keep growing at that pace.

Every student that goes through our program gets evaluated at the beginning and at the end of it, and ends with a report of what he/she's developed. The main reason we see as how impactful we're being in our student's lives is the fact that 86% of them has extended the time inicially compromised with us. Most of them buy the 3 months subscriptions, and re-purchase a second 3 month subscription or the 9 month subscription after that. We have happier kids and parents, and we recieve compliments every time we have the interview with them (that's part of the program. We recieve great comments via Whatsapp, Facebook and even Instagram that we'd love to share with you.

Our main goal for next year is to improve our communication strategies and to receive appropriate sponsorship of our methodology. That way we'll be rolling into growth stage.

For the next five years we're planning to expand to neighboring countries such as Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Argentina. We would be closely considering the possibility to arrive at Mexico, Brasil, Panama, and other countries.

The first one is a cultural barrier, since the awareness of the importance of the soft skills is just on the rise in Latin America.

The second one is our need for a significant support of our methodology so we can earn the trust of people easier.

For the first one we’re already working on a communication strategy. That will lead to investing on publicity just to show the importance of these skills. We will need to find a proper marketing organization for this matter.

For the second barrier, we’re being revised by external consultants and education organizations. We will need the approval of one university, and we’ll be looking for an international organization as well.

Full time: 2

Part time: 6

We have an amazing guy behind our programas that focus on real development of people. He has worked on a school and on different NGO helping kids and vulnerable people. He aced his psychologist bachelor degree and has profoundly studied emotional intelligence. He's the emotional side of the team.

On the other hand, we have an administrator that has worked on finances for over 5 years and knows well the backoffice. He's more of the logical side.

We're not partering with any organization besides our business incubator.

We charge a monthly fee for our weekly program. Exactly as a gym membership.

We offer benefits as interviews and reports the more we can have you in our program.

We sell a service, so our financial sustainability path lies on our commercial plan.

We have a different plan for each age group. We are starting focusing on children and teenagers and we will be deploying commercially step by step. 

We're looking for partners that can help us escalate our service in order to reach much more people. We have a solid plan and with Solve's help it can grow even more, even faster.

https://solve-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/

Our service is considered new for society so we need to generate trust fast.For us having an educational institution such as MIT backing our project could speed up the process of trust earning which would accelerate our service.

https://casel.org/

A specialized organization such as Casel could be the technical support we need to help us endorse our methodology.

https://www.iadb.org/en

The IDB implement huge projects aligned with out goal and if we could be a part of them it could help us as well.

We're planning to generate awareness of the importance of the communities working collaboratively. We're planning to change not only the lives of our student, but through this, society itself. For that we need to keep growing and reaching new people, and this prize could help us grow much faster.

Empathy is the most powerful tool there is to reduce violence. We are already making our students learn the importance of empathy and we're helping them develop this skill each week. But we want to go a step further.

We need to implement our soft skills development program for the elderly. They carry an important message not only to their sons and daughters, but to their grand-kids as well. We know the world in which they grew, the hard times of war were carrying a weapon could be praised by society as being capable to defend. Now we are sure violence doesn't solve violence, and creating an opportunity to generate a space where they can learn more about handling conflict and being empathetic can change the message they deliver to the future generations. Emotional intelligence will also be huge for them to handle third-age problems such as depression or the feeling of being relegated from family priorities. 

This prize can give us the tools to make this happen.