BY SILAS APOLLO
Gaming and digital tech company, Viral Gorrrila has unveiled a series of web-based mobile games to help primary-going children learn more about financial literacy, social skills, school curriculum lessons, and African history and culture.
Dubbed AMUA, a Swahili term for decide, the mobile web-based edutainment game platform targets primary-going children from Grades one to six and borrows from the CBC curriculum guidelines.
The platform is piloting a series of 10 games and animation stories designed to help children learn lessons through the journey of ‘Kitu’ and her nomadic family who are traveling across the continent of Africa on a fun adventure under the sun.
Through the games, players will immerse themselves in the history, culture, and stories of different countries across Africa as they play. Each game played unlocks a new part of the story and reveals new mysteries.
Joyce Muthoni, the founder and CEO, Viral Gorrrila said that Amua Games are fun games that will help children reinforce their classroom lessons and build their critical thinking, problem-solving, and cognitive skills and offer life lessons.
“Our games are colorful, they have music, and they require physical interactions, not like sitting and just listening to a teacher for hours. Children enjoy their time playing and hardly realize they are learning about places, cultures, and history in Africa,” Ms. Muthoni said.
“The kids learn by doing, and that is so much more powerful. Amua Games are one-on-one interactions directly with each child, tailoring the content in the game specifically to the grade level of that child,” she added.
Muthoni emphasizes that exposing a child to mobile games is like giving them a private storyteller assistant teacher, who reinforces the lessons they are learning in class especially when it comes to learning histories and cultures from different countries in Africa.
“AMUA edutainment games aim to improve knowledge of our children on the rich African history and culture. We are therefore fusing storytelling and gaming for them to learn more about the different histories and cultures in Africa,” she said.
On the other hand, with the performance drop in last year’s KCPE social studies, AMUA games are expected to help the upcoming candidates to increase and improve their knowledge base across the different learning areas.
At the same time, AMUA games aim at preserving and complementing efforts by UNESCO to prevent decolonization of African culture and history.
“We believe modernising the curriculum includes solutions that keep pupils engaged and ensure they learn how to be critical, confident, and creative—abilities required for success in the modern workplace.
“Playing games greatly increases the brain’s capacity to memorize things. Games enhance the ability to think in a critical way, which boosts the capacity to retain information for a longer time,” said Muthoni.
