Strategist & content creator
Purpose Discovery Track
The Discovery of Purpose Track is an online journey, offered free of charge to the community. The purpose of the trail is to provide contact with topics that are related to purpose and thus provide self-knowledge in relation to professional possibilities.
Scope: Online formation course for IDEAR PUCRS.
Duration: January 2021 - January 2022
Team: Roberta Fin Motta, Gabriela Birnfeld Kurtz, Vinícius Cárcamo, Débora Conforto, Ana Cecília Bisso Nunes, Naira Libermann, Eliane Bariviera, Gabriéle Jeffman.
My role in the course: Content creator and researcher.
What is the Purpose Discovery Track
"You mysteriously wake up on a deserted island, not knowing what happened. Your memories are fragmented. From now on, your challenge is to discover your motivations, goals and purpose, to find yourself and unravel the mystery working as a team".
This is how the Purpose Discovery Track starts. The participants have to discover their own purpose in life and enroll in a world-saving adventure.
Click here to read about the course in the University website
Watch the trailer for the first edition:
In a hurry? Click here to jump to the student's feedbacks and results!
Step 1 - The Idea
During IDEAR's events and programs, our team deteced a latent opportunity regarding courses and workshops that foster the self-knowledge and entrepreneurial competencies. Our events that had the highest attendence usually were related to those topics. We also partnered multiple times with PUCRS Careers, a University branch that has career orientation services for the community. He got information from them that there were new students at the University that needed more guidance regarding this topic, and the COVID-19 pandemic forced professionals to reinvent themselves, and they were also looking for vocational programs.
We also understood that as an innovation lab, we had to go further than just creating another entrepreneurial career guidance course. We also had inumerous courses both in person and online and found out that the ones that have more hands on experiences usually have more engagement. So, we decided to go for a storytelling-gamified approach.
Roberta Fin Motta, a PhD. Psychologist, professor from the School of Health and Life Sciences at PUCRS and member of IDEAR was the project's leader, and shw was in charge of the pedagogical foundations of the course. We worked together as I transformed her vision into a storytelling experience.
Along with the story, we partner with another University department, called Online Graduation, with Professor and PhD. Débora Conforto and the game designer Vinícius Cárcamo, to make the interactive instruments and assemble the experience in the platform Moodle.
Step 2 - The story and key-concepts
Based on the materials and exercises Prof. Motta had in mind, and on the hours the course had (20 hours for the students to finish all the course) I divided the experience in 5 chapters. Due to privacy agreements, I am not allowed to disclosure all the story and content.
The main plot is based on the protagonist, that discovers that they are lost in an island. As the story progresses, they get to know the isles' guardian spirits, that help them to go through the journey. Later on, they discover that they are not alone, and their comrades were kidnaped by a villain. They were the chosen one's to unlock their potential to change the world, but the villain wanted to trap them so their awakening could not happen.
Some of the concepts and excercises we used for this course were:
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Self-knowledge and confidence with Johari Window Model
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Self-reflection on their journey and purpose with Ikigai-based exercises
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Understanding of the Entrecomp's Entrepreneurial Competence Framework
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The relationship between that framework and ONU's Sustainable Develpment Goals
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Business Model You, by Tim Clark, to wrap up the Sustainable Goals with the Entrepreneurial Competences.
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Saras Sarasvathy's Effectuation Model for teams to understand how each one's competences can complement each other for a greater good.
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Elaboration of a plan of action to put ideas into projects that could be achievable.
Prof. Motta, Prof. Conforto and I also created an evaluation instrument for the students to fill after they concluded all the course, so we could understand the experience and improve it for the next edition.
Step 3 - The production
Our timeline for the project was:
Jan 2021 - Project conception, storytelling construction and activity planning.
We conducted several meetings with IDEAR's and Online Graduation's teams to understand what could and couldn't be done. After that, we settled into a schedule for programming the couse.
Feb-Apr 2021 - Online Graduation team proceeded to create the interactive objects, images and design for the project.
May 2021 - The teams worked together on reviewing and refining the content.
June-July 2021 - We tested the course with 4 students form different courses at the University, and gathered their perceptions. We then proceeded to some more refining.
Aug 2021 - We gathered with the University's Communications Department to outline a strategy to launch the couse. At the end of the month, we sent an E-mail to all students and the 130 slots were filled in less than 24 hours, leading us to create a Landing Page with a waiting list for the next course.
Sep-Dec 2021 - We conducted the first edition of the course, with IDEAR's team working to solve the student's questions and concerns. After the end of the experience, the participants were asked to fill an evaluation form so we could understand how they liked the experience.
Jan-Feb 2022 - We worked on improving the course for its next launch, that happened later on, in March 2022. The project is still ongoing, but I stopped working in February.
Step 4 - The results
In the first edition, we had 130 enrolled students, and those slots were filled in less than 24 hours. As we noticed that we could take more people, in the second edition, that started in March 2022, we had 480 students enrolled. That makes up a total of 610 participants in both editions.
We had very positive feedback from the participants in the first edition as well (the second one is still ongoing, so results are pending). We did an evaluation form and got 47 answers. As you can see below, the majority of the participants agreed (blue ones - 85%) with the affirmation: "I believe that the narrative is well integrated to the proposed reflexions and it contribuited to my self knowledge path":
We also asked them if they agreed with the sentence: "I would recomend the course to other people", and got 78% of adherence. You can see the graphic below.
The project was and continues to be a great success. We also started developing a spin-off, shorter version focused on high schoolers. I created a new short story and the project is ongoing with the remaining team.