Real Things in Virtual Worlds. Education.

In times of economic crisis, western society has a great chance of getting back to reality. 

Real things should recover their true value. Brands, trends, bonds, options, futures and glamour are virtual. All of these are not bad, but things just get wrong when virtual things become more important than real ones and replace them completely, like it happened in financial sector. 

Getting back to reality. This is what crisis came for.

Virtual worlds may be useful, unless they start replacing real world for your kid. Otherwise, there will be some sort of crisis. I do share worries of Oscar-winning film-maker Lord Puttam.

Education in Virtual Worlds

The latest trend in kids virtual worlds marketing is approaching parents and making them inviting kids to a virtual space. And the smartest way to do it is telling that a virtual world is an educational one, so parents spend money easier. 

Can virtual worlds be efficient educational platform? 

Learn by playing is one of the most efficient learning concepts ever. In Ukraine, centuries ago, Cossacks trained their children fighting skills through learning games. This concept works so great simply because of passion. Whenever it is business or education, if you do it with passion - you achieve the best results. Therefore, games are needed to generate kid's passion to education. And that should be the main goal of any game or virtual world calling itself educational. And the first impression is that virtual worlds fit perfectly for this task.

 

But let us look what multi-million investment educational virtual worlds have to offer:

- chat and social features

- 90% of games bought from 3rd parties or cloned from popular gameplays

- 10% of educational games and features

I do not have any stats on how kids spend their time in educational virtual worlds, but I am more than sure that using educational part takes less than 5%. It happens, because virtual worlds are about communication and fun. And the worst thing  is when educational part is designed to be used only to earn more virtual money or goods and not because it is fun. It only convinces kids that education is boring.

In such a case, it is not about education. It is a marketing feature for parents. Such approach will not generate any passion to education or hunger to learning new things in kids mind.

 

How we do it in Chobots

First of all, we have a conceptual setting where kids play as aliens who have to research the Earth. Nowadays, we started development of a small 3D Cartoon which will explain why it is so important for Chobots. 

This creates a common sense for the whole game and also atmosphere demanding constant research and learning new things. This is supported with constantly updated "Latest Earth Researches" laboratory, telescope and games design.

Secondly, we do not even say our world is educational.

For Russian market, we are going to add English learning games, but we honestly say that it is done to attract kids to learning English. It is impossible to learn English on a level within a virtual world. Our challenge was creating not a marketing feature, but creation of English learning games which are even more interesting than typical online games. So kids start playing them just because it's fun. Together with necessity to communicate in International environment this creates great motivation to start learning English. 

The biggest part of our world consists of exclusive multiplayer games and each second multiplayer game is a game for a team, where players have to achieve a common goal or compete with another team.

It was a complex technological and usability challenge we accomplished successfully. Multiplayer games is our main tool to attract kids and also to make them socialize, and to train collaborative skills. This is what virtual worlds and online games can do great.

Later on, we plan to add more quests, missions and facts about our planet, economics, humans and success. 

Short Summary

Real education in virtual worlds? I think that's another virtual myth.

Generating passion to learning new things? That's a real thing we do in Chobots.