gademix of record
BREAKING TEEN’S FEAR OF FAILURE DOWN
“HOW MIGHT WE CREATE A TRUST ENVIRONMENT WHERE FUN IS USED AS A CATALYST AGAINST THE FEAR OF FAILURE?”
CASE
Gademix, an after-school space for children between 9 and 16 years old, was our collaboration partner during the course Applied Play.
The center of Gademix are the kids; the majority of them are on risk of exclusion, have dysfunctional families and a significant lack of confidence. The brief was to use play for acquiring knowledge, skills or behaviors.
SOLUTION
Gademix of Records is an on-going game experience that sparks collaboration among all participants of Gademix. Fun and unusual monthly challenges encourage players to team up and work to establish records together.
CONCEPT
Monthly fun and collaborative challenges encourage the participants of the centre to team up and step out of their comfort zone by trying out collaborative challenges, so the community feeling gets stronger and the fear of failing is defeated.
How it works
Everyone is welcome to create and suggest monthly collaborative challenges.
Each month, some challenges are selected and displayed in the Communication Wall, together with the manifesto.
The participants are free to attempt record breaks, track their evolution and share their improvements in the social media.
The records and pictures are collected in a physical album, their official annual Gademix Book of Records.
A project for the whole community
By including both -volunteers and children- as active participants, we ensure that the existing gap between these two groups is minimized. A child-lead activity changes the role of the adults: they are not expected to be merely facilitators but active players.
PROCESS
The key of this project was the continuous visits we did to Gademix during the 6 weeks of the course, that let us understand deeply the ecology of this unique place, connect with the participants and design a solution that constitutes a bridge among all of them. Gademix of Records was the result of using play as a driver during our visits to connect with the users and as a result in the final solution. Every week we had inputs, interventions and outputs that we transformed into insights and design decisions.
The basis
We realized that, despite of their different backgrounds, a lack of confidence and fear of failing while playing or doing some activities was common in all of them. So we focused on creating a trust environment where fun is used as a catalyst against the fear of failure.
Literature relates playful and safe education spaces, free from the fears of feeling stupid or being rejected, as a place where participants are encouraged and enabled to take risks, starting from small ones and moving it to other contexts outside the classrooms.
That is what we wanted to achieve with Gademix of Records, the possibility of participating in fun and goofy collaborative challenges that generate trust among the community to enable the kids to embrace unknown activities, feeling safe from mistakes and seeing them as an improvement opportunity.
