27 April 2023

Game that promotes environmental conservation wins the Game Challenge 2023

By Donald

After competing with more than 60 people and 16 teams made up of professionals, graduates and students from different careers from all over Peru in a challenging 48-hour hackathon that consisted of creating video games that promote the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). , a team of five members emerged as the winner of the Game Challenge 2023, a tournament organized by the Toulouse Lautrec High School and sponsored by the Embassy of the United States in Peru. The winners were the creators of Reborn, a video game that seeks to preserve the environment and reduce pollution to counteract climate change.

After an exhaustive evaluation of teams from Lima, Pucallpa, Huancayo, Trujillo, Ica, Cusco and Puno, they were five finalist teams, among which the jury chose Reborn as the winner, whose main objective is to promote preservation and action for the climate in students who are attending the sixth grade of primary school on average. It is a video game that adapts very well to dynamic learning and reinforcement of topics related to science and the environment of the curriculum of that degree of study- such as basic minerals, chemical elements, nutrients that a plant needs to generate oxygen, as well as the processes that occur in photosynthesis. All this while choosing the correct components to feed an apple tree for its correct growth.

National contest winners

National contest winners

Renzo Guido, academic coordinator of the Toulouse Lautrec videogames and digital entertainment career, said that the evaluation team was multidisciplinary because students and graduates participated from different careers such as design, art, programming and development. “The objective of this Game Challenge was to show young people how the world can be transformed through purposeful video games, providing solutions to real and current social problems. For this reason, the criteria for deliberating the winner were: the correlation with the chosen SDGs, the educational potential of the video game, the willingness of the team to develop it, the aesthetic quality and the projection of growth to include more tools for educational purposes.he clarified.

The winning team was not only multidisciplinary, but also had representatives of two different institutions. The group is made up of Toulouse Lautrec graduates: Alejandro Medina Pratto, main programmer and mechanics; Cristhian Checa Marcos, gameplay and mechanics designer; Erika Santillan Yalta, graphic designer and UI designer, and Pool Perez Chinga, associate and interface programmer; as well as, by the student of the University of Lima, Diego Tinoco Galarza, artist of 2D assets. It is worth mentioning that the organizers provided per diem and stay in Lima to one of them, who had to travel from the city of Huacho to meet with his team.

National contest winners

National contest winners

Diego Tinoco, representative of the group, commented on the projections they have with the video game. “Reborn now has children between the ages of 10 and 13 as an audience, according to the educational curricula and the approval of the educational psychologists who participated in this contest. In the future, we want to develop it at a higher level, adding elements such as animals and plants of other varieties from Peru that complement the version and thus perfect it as educational material. We are interested that this video game allows students to become aware of some environmental dangers and why conservation is necessary”he commented.

It should be noted that Reborn will soon be available for iOS and you can already find it to play from any Android device. It can be downloaded from the Play Store, through the following links.

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