The Edugame Project

Remember when I said that I was going to share my experiences on the earlier years in Pinteraktif? So, here we go:

Where were I? Oh, the Permata CSR project.

As I shared before, on my third month, I moved from LPM in ITB to Pinteraktif office in Batik Agung. Days gone for adapting with new place and colleagues. Until one day my boss phoned me and asked me to join a meeting with PermataBank for a newly briefed e-learning project.

Basically, they (CSR division of PermataBank--professionally, we call them SME which stands for Subject Matter Expert aka the client who holds all knowledge necessary for the e-learning) wanted to make an aid to help their employees in an annually social work. It was a mandatory activity and financial education for children was the current topic then. They already had books, laptops (for read e-books), board games, but they wanted something breakthrough. And apparently an educational digital game was the answer for it.

So, we developed the educational game (edugame for short) from the beginning. We were only given a book from BI (Bank Indonesia) for reference, the client trusted us to construct the whole gamifying thing. I wrote the script and others drew characters, backgrounds, buttons, then animated all together with sprinkles of jolly back sound. It was of course not a short-duration project because it involved a lot of follow-up meetings (means me went back and forth Bandung-Jakarta), revisions, refinements, not to mention the bugs which occurred several times when we (beta)tested it.

Long story short, the edugame was finally ready to be launched. Before all set, me and the team tested it first to local elementary school which was actually owned by my aunt. The aim was to examine kids' response and acceptance to the game.

We had teachers tested it too! (that's my aunt who wears floral hijab)

The game itself was a simple adventure first-person game designed for children aged 9-12. User's accompanied by a key character named Bintang and together they'll explore places and collect points. Each place delivers the financially important topics in a fun way; puzzles, coloring, matching, spot-the-differences.

All and all, what I like about this CSR PermataBank project is the public engagement. I really love seeing people get excited about something I made. I enjoy delivering something fun to public, educating them about something. You may think then I should be a teacher for good. But no, I don't like teaching.

When finally it was released officially by the director of PermataBank, I felt so proud because it was very much appreciated by all. It might not be as grand as national project or something that is politically important, but it's always be my (and of course, Pinteraktif's) significant milestone and portfolio. Oh, and it's featured also in our web, check this out. If you find some similar sentences between this post and that webpage, that's because I wrote the copy for the web. :))

Cheers!