(Discover #Edteq) Affordance Studio - The pleasure of learning while playing video games!

As part of the dissemination of a series of portraits of companies members of the Edteq Association (Enterprises for the development of educational technologies in Quebec), it is our pleasure today to present Affordance Studio, one of the founding companies of the Edteq Association!

"Are you a gamer? "At Affordance Studio, the team believes that being a" gamer Is not limited to video games. We believe that humans are by nature " gamers ". To support the point, are you able to answer "no" to all of the questions below?

• Do you like card games?
• Do you like video games?
• Do you like sport?
• Do you like role-playing games?
• Do you like skill games?
• Do you like board games?

In 2014, the three co-founders of Affordance Studio began working together to achieve their goal of creating games to change the world. The team, now made up of 12 people, works every day with the goal of designing and developing games that can help teachers teach complex subjects, so that students can become effective citizens of the 21st century. Here are, among several, four games that we have developed!

The manager

The Responsible is a game created for the financial institution Desjardins to educate adults and children about socially responsible investing. In the game, teams must choose funds in which to invest the money to obtain a financial reward, but also to have a positive impact on the environment, society and governance. Does investing in wind farms always pay off? And do the financial benefits of oil funds always outweigh their environmental consequences? This game, a hybrid of a Web application and a tabletop game, has been used in more than 100 classrooms to date in Quebec. Desjardins is planning a provincial launch next year.

Spellers

In 2017, Alloprof asked Affordance to design an online game to help students learn over 250 vocabulary words and 23 grammar rules in English. Inspired by style games Pokemon, Spellers motivates the player-student to develop lexical and grammatical knowledge in order to capture as many creatures as possible. To do this, Affordance's team of artists have drawn and illustrated more than 90 creatures to capture in the game. Since its launch 5 months ago, more than 55,000 players have played it, an encouraging start!

Here is the game trailer: 

And here is the poster of the game:

Morbus Delirium

Ebola, Zika and other infectious diseases have wreaked havoc internationally in recent years. Are we doing enough to prepare for and prevent the next outbreak? Led by the Montreal Science Center, Morbus Delirium is a story-of-you-the-hero in the form of an interactive comic strip in which players must save Quebec and the planet from an infectious disease outbreak. Players (target 8-14 years old) must examine pathogens, identify symptoms, go back in time, locate patient zero, and find a vaccine. Inside the museum, visitors can also download an Android / iOS application to extend the gaming experience in physical space with a scavenger hunt for different pathogens. Who knew you could have fun killing viruses ?!

Watch a video of the game explained by the team: 

And here is the poster of the game:

Ready to negotiate

Have you ever been afraid to speak a second language? The Affordance team created Ready to Negotiate to combat this fear, a game where students take on the roles of buyers and sellers in order to negotiate out loud and synchronously different items such as apartment rentals, cars, cell phones, vacations, wages, pirate ships and even space travel. Learners are matched by play and motivated to collaborate and compete through missions, badges, and a leaderboard. A study by Dr Walcir Cardoso (Concordia University) found that students who play this game learn twice as many vocabulary words as traditional conversation activities.

Thank you to the teachers of Quebec!

The Affordance Studio team would like to thank all the teachers in Quebec for their work in preparing our children to become effective citizens of the 21st century. We believe that games that are well designed can help achieve this goal inside and outside the classroom. We are proud to contribute to the province's incredibly rich educational tradition. And we look forward to working in partnership with schools, teachers, parents and students in Quebec to continue our important work in the years to come!