Simple Solutions to Complex Problems Board Games
snakes and ladders
it’s a game everyone knows and loves
originally called moksha pratam in north
india it was created in the 2nd
century a.d and focuses on a life
journey
complicated by virtues which are the
ladders and vices which are the snakes
the game focuses on identifying your
goal accepting outcomes
keeping on moving and controlling the
risk and not the reward
indeed people pray not to land on a
snake rather than praying to land
on a ladder it was popularized in 1943
by milton bradley who’s the pioneer of
the board game industry
and he commercialized this in the uk and
the us
and snakes and ladders really predates
any formal system of
language education politics and even
common law initially it was meant to
reinforce the teachings of hinduism
in a practical way without having to
resort to physical books
and designed to teach and communicate
through experience
so the question was can snakes and
ladders actually influence behavior and
can board games
influence behavior so a study last year
by professor mitsuhiro naco
looked at this very phenomenon in a
randomized control experiment
comparing teaching through traditional
methods as well as teaching
through board games that promoted health
education
he found that over two-thirds of
participants had a higher
knowledge-based test score
three months after this intervention so
the next question was
how can we leverage that concept to
bring
key education to those who need it most
meet victor otinea a 14 year old from
nairobi in kenya his parents live on
around 400 kenyan shillings a day
it’s about three pounds and his
attendance record at school
is less than 20 due to the inability of
his parent
to pay regular school fees he studies at
gotoka primary school on the outskirts
of nairobi
to public school with about 120 pupils
focused on art english and maths as well
as teaching children
child care cooking and general exercise
so it’s focused on the core subjects in
the classroom
but sorely missing the physical social
and health education
that we fundamentally take for granted
in the western world
indeed pshe isn’t really a concept in
kenya it’s not part of the curriculum of
schools
in 2015 the kenyan government realized
this
and published a plan called the
education for all act
they identified key areas of improvement
they found
that students had inadequate knowledge
on values
and life skills there was indulgence in
risky behavior especially drug abuse
and negative peer pressure there were
those inadequate communication skills
and there was a lack of capacity
information and
role models that children could really
look up to
this all led to about 25 percent of
primary school-aged pupils
not even enrolled in school leading to
1.2 million
illiterate population drug abuse was the
key
issue the awareness rate was so low 20
of participants aged 9 to 15 understood
the dangers of drug abuse
alcohol cigarettes and cut which is
similar to speed
had positive associations in 73
of the student population and shockingly
the median age for the first
use of these drugs is just nine years
old
so this is charles masharia a trained
social worker in the uk
and a kenyan national he is a social and
academic counselor
for four schools in nairobi and in 2008
he started the mash foundation trust
focusing on sponsoring pupils throughout
the education system
in kenya he set up programs to empower
educate and support communities
especially orphans and vulnerable
children
in kenya and i’ve been working with
charles since 2013
as part of a program to bring
international volunteers out to nairobi
and teach life skills health safety
hygiene drug abuse education and morals
to children so we sat down after our
trip to kenya in 2013
and looked at how we can sustainably and
scalably teach
life skills and impart these learnings
to children
in a scalable fashion so we thought
let’s take a concept that everyone knows
so well and repurpose it for social
education
particularly on drug abuse so we adapted
well-loved
highly visible board games that children
already play in a social context
and infused a moral element to these
games
so we created ludo and snakes and
ladders with a difference and with a
purpose
it’s almost going back to the second
century concept of virtues and values
through
board games and stripping away the
commercialization
that’s happened in the following
centuries so here you can see our drug
abuse and healthy living ludo
and road safety snakes and ladders
created and printed locally in kenya
with the purpose of
leveraging board games to influence
behaviour
focusing on drug abuse to start with as
our target was to increase awareness and
promote positive
peer pressure and change that positive
association with hard drugs
we took the key findings from the
educator for rule report
focusing on the key areas of weakness
and mitigated those themes
through these board games focusing on
reinforcing good behavior
raising awareness of key issues and
teaching this in a fun
engaging way that students would
actually remember
and teaching through a collaborative
manner as opposed to just
talking so we got approval from the
ministry of education and did a limited
of these games that we then launched in
14 schools
around nairobi so once we got the
approval from the ministry of education
we then took these board games
out into schools we started with three
pilot schools
kachoka cassarani and gianchiro covering
over 300 students focusing on the ages
of 9 to 14.
we split children into groups of 5 to 6
and literally played board games with
them as a fun
and social activity we saw that kids
were extremely engaged as they loved the
concept
of having fun while they were learning
crucially
we followed up with schools and the
community after our pilot program
to see the impact and it was amazing
positive attitudes towards hard drugs
had dropped by 60
we found that peer pressure caused a
cyclical effect children now had role
models within themselves
and they were reinforcing their own good
behavior following the crowd
in a good way and among the adult
population we saw reverse teaching
kids were taking these board games home
and talking about their learnings
with their parents resulting in a 70
awareness increase in the adult
population on substance abuse
in these communities and therefore we
created a cyclical
a sustainable learning pattern that
covered generation to generation on the
dangers of substance abuse
through a very very simple concept we
didn’t need major socio-economic studies
we didn’t need a complex education
training regime we didn’t need to
overcomplicate the number of
stakeholders involved
we just took a very simple concept of
board games
to influence student behavior and in the
next year
we’re expanding this initiative out to
tanzania and uganda
as well as augmenting our board games
with additional topics
in particular focusing on hygiene and
hand washing
as leonardo da vinci once said many
years ago simplicity is the ultimate
form of sophistication
we took a very complex socio-economic
problem in kenya
broke it down into its fundamental
layers and created an initiative that
caused maximum
impact resources were simply not a
constraint for us
we just had to be smart in how to
utilize allocate and leverage what we
had at our disposal
to add value to the communities it’s
easy to be complicated
but simplicity is really an art and i
hope that this small initiative in board
games
has demonstrated how impactful that
ethos can be
thank you very much
you