Strategist & content creator
ColabAção
The ColabAção is a card game designed to foster innovative solutions and discussions over different alternatives for a problem. It was designed by IDEAR's team and tested as an activity inside the Integrated Work in Healthcare course, requisit for many majors curriculum at the School of Ciences of Health and Science, at PUCRS.
Scope: Pedagogical instrument for IDEAR Laboratory
Duration: November 2019 - December 2020
Team: Ana Cecília Bisso Nunes, Andrea Bandeira, Débora Conforto, Denizar Mello, Diego Furtado, Gabriela Kurtz, Naira Libermann, Roberta Fin Motta, Vinicius Rafael Cárcamo.
My role in the project: Game designer
What is ColabAção?
When we first envisioned this game, our objective was to create a physical card game, inspired in other entrepreneurship games, such as Delegation Poker and Proto. However, the pandemic hit in early 2020, and made us change our strategy. We then focused on a digital card game that could be played inside the Univeristy's leaning platform, Moodle.
ColabAção is a digital card game structured into five categories - Objectives, Team, Partnerships, Time, Resources - representing the central elements of the processes for designing social interventions. It is composed of 32 cards and must be played in teams, in which each member is responsible for thinking about the combination of cards and proposing solutions. The deck is divided into the following categories: Objective (1 card); Team (7 cards); Partnership (7 cards); Time (7 cards); and Resources (10 cards). The card game is designed for a co-op mode, to develop people’s Entrepreneurial Competences. The professor’s role is to act as a mediator and a mentor to guide the students and actively help them from start to finish.
Designing ColabAção
IDEAR's team (myself included) worked along with Estudio Etérea Creative Studio to create the game's concept and features. We start with a benchmark and looking into other games for inspiration, such as the ones I mentioned before. The studio was responsible for the card's design, but they also contribuited to its features and rules.
You can see a video on how the game works below:
We started creating the game in November of 2019 and finished it by April 2020. The Pandemic context ended up delaying this project, along with the changes we had to make because of it.
ColabAção in action and results
In order to test the game for future expansions, we partnered with Andrea Bandeira, professor at the School of Health and Life Sciences and coordinator of Teaching-Service in Health and Débora Conforto, coordinator of Online Graduation. They allowed us to insert the game in the context of a distance learning discipline called Integrated Work in Healthcare.
To integrate the game in the discipline, we designed the main challenges in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. ColabAção was part of the final assignment, and the students had to form interdisciplinary groups to figure out a solution. After playing the game, they developed their ideas with the professors' mediation and recorded Pitch-like presentations. After that, they had discussions with their peers.
As for the results:
The mediator professor found that the proposals had high quality, when analyzing one of the humanitarian solutions: “I am delighted, I may be overly appreciative, but the team responded very well to the challenge presented by the ColabAção game”.
The unpredictable nature of the game was something the students appreciated, as you can see from their comments: “It was the draws that provided the surprises when creating the proposal”; “Creativity to create something different”; “we had to use our creativity to complete the drawn task”.
Also 48.9% of the students stated that the ColabAção game helped them to develop entrepreneurial skills and to understand how to design projects as part of the course.
In terms of usability, the students said that the game was interactive, innovative and dynamic. The ease of use and surprising challenges were also pointed out by them.
According to their feedback, they also understood how to use entrepreneurship in their daily lives, and how to include knowledge from other professions.
One of the mediating professors also decided to include the game in another course, called "Advisory, Consulting and Supervision", part of the Social Work program, as a result of the level of engagement by the students, as demonstrated by the quality of the proposals produced. We customized the challenges to fit the course proposal, which related to the work of international humanitarian aid organizations.
For the future, IDEAR also plans on expanding the game to other disciplines.