[game_edu] Support Youth Activists!

[Nathan Maton]

Hi -

We're running a Kickstarter campaign to fundraise so we can work with the
partners we've joined to help make youth activists more successful and our
planet more civically active.  See our pitch below and visit our campaign
link here: http://j.mp/zR3TJB

Thanks for listening to our passion.  Feel free to let me know if you have
any questions.
Nathan

*Let's Use Games To Learn Teamwork!
*
Youth are the future.  The values they learn stick with them throughout
their lives and shape our world.  Ensuring they have positive experiences
in community development experiences is essential to us living in a
peaceful planet.  Games can teach complex issues and change behavior better
than any other method. Here's our pitch for the project, I hope you find it
moving and consider supporting it.

Foundations and organizations invest millions of dollars in programs
designed to help teams of youth improve their communities and the world.
Over 80% percent of these projects are small teams of less than 10 people,
and over 50,000 of these projects fail every year. Countless other
youth-led activist organizations fail to meet milestones or simply disband
before achieving their vision, lacking the information and skills necessary
to avoid common obstacles along their path.

Team building is the biggest problem faced by youth activists, simply
because it is rarely taught in schools.  Our game will teach team building
using real scenarios in a multiplayer game where they must form and build
teams to succeed.

We've finished and tested paper prototype.  Now our partners are ready for
something digital that they can easily distribute.  Help us make this a
reality!

*4see
*
Ala' Diab and Nathan Maton teamed up in 2011 and in that short time have
already produced two award-winning games.  We're going to be designing and
programming the game ourselves with support from an awesome team of
national experts including:


   1. Dan Norton, co-founder of Filament games
   2. Charles Amis, game design lead on Gamestar Mechanic
   3. Jessica Bynoe, youth development expert
   4. Adam Fletcher, President of Common Action, over a decade of
   experience training youth
   5. Brandon Hill, Trainer at the Oasis Center for Youth Development
   6. Brad Lewis, Youth Development Expert
   7. Alan Gershenfeld, Co-Founder of E-Line Media
   8. Abby Keisa, Youth Coordinator & Researcher

*Our Project:
*
Over the last several years Nathan has devoted time to working extensively
with youth activists, running an education policy group while in college,
researching how youth develop their values, creating games to build more
environmentalists and mentoring students in DC.

Our game uses team building research from Harvard done by Marshall Ganz and
Ruth Wageman to focus on the key elements of forming and working
effectively in teams.  They include 5 key elements of teams: finding a
common purpose, forming a team with diverse backgrounds, establishing clear
roles, establishing clear boundaries and explicit norms.

In our prototype players have to work in clear roles to find clues and use
them to convince NPCs to join a campaign.  It is a multiplayer game and the
more the players learn to collaborate, the better they'll do.  They get to
work with a variety of team members from other teams than the one they
currently work on outside of the game to better learn their skill set.
 Then, in the final level, the original team must tackle a more complex
problem that relates to their real work.

An example of a similar game is World Without Oil, an environmental
alternate reality game where players lived in a fictional world that was
running out of oil but took actions in their real lives to improve it.  The
game helped people create sustainable gardens in their yards and advocate
for real policy change.  Just like World Without Oil created better
environmentalists, we're creating better young change makers.

Over the next 6 months we will turn our physical prototype into a digital
game if funded.  Support us to get to play it!


--
t: @nathanmaton
w: nathanmaton.com
ln: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanmaton
Writer for NPR/KQED's Mindshift ed tech blog
Community Manager at Gameful
Co-Founder of DCGam.es

-- 
Support our kickstarter campaign!
<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/945738280/4see>
t: @nathanmaton
w: nathanmaton.com
ln: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanmaton
Writer for NPR/KQED's Mindshift ed tech blog <http://mindshift.kqed.org/>
Community Manager at Gameful <http://gameful.org/>
Co-Founder of DCGam.es
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