CUiB An enlightening board-game about climate change and migration
2020 looks promising
Back in September 2019, we wrote about restarting our work with CUiB. Firstly, by going to WELS, the World Education Leadership Symposium, in Switzerland, then to a matchmaking event with social entrepreneurs in Bratislava, and an inspiring meeting with the Romanian Ornithological Society. These diverse intersections with people and organisations not only turned into long-lasting relationships but also boosted our creative energy. They ultimately inspired us to move forward with our playful learning approach and our plan to design new educational tools.
In the past couple of months, we have also grown into a multidisciplinary team. We're now looking at several paths to follow in our work: One direction that we find both pressing and relevant is making academic research more inclusive and more accessible to the public.
Based on our experience and knowledge, the majority of research outcomes mainly stay in academic cliques, with absolutely no chance or intention to ever reach a broader audience. Unfortunately, research rarely makes it even into popular media, adding up to a great deal of lost potential.
An article from 2016 already stated that "Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities – 82% of articles published in humanities [journals] are not even cited once."
We believe there is significant potential in making research more transparent and in disseminating its outcomes to a much larger audience: Information opens people's minds, and changes lives. Being researchers ourselves, we believe we have a responsibility to bring society forward. We want our work to have an impact on society, mostly in the way we educate future generations. Our role is not passive, we are not mere observers of societal and cultural shifts, but promoters of change and advocates for improvement.
And we start early, with children: They are more capable of understanding complex global issues than we give them credit for. We believe there is no point in delaying access to the knowledge that will impact their lives and their roles as members of a global community. We develop games such as CUiB to make research outcomes relevant and accessible to educators and, ultimately to children.
Our approach is kind, respectful, and playful: We strongly believe that through ludic learning, we can support children in exciting learning adventures, using a positive mindset and discourse.
We're on a mission. Keep close.
Mental notes
We're back in Berlin!
It's been one week since our workshop at WELS, in Switzerland, and we are still smiling with joy and excitement. For three days, we have been surrounded by researchers, school leaders, NGO representatives, and teachers; everyone there was determined to work hard to improve the system and take ownership for the way our children grow. It was rewarding and reassuring to see hundreds of people from all over the world willing to help school children become better humans in a better world.
As planned, we brought our playful contribution to the WELS symposium. We had amazing people participating in our workshop, both school-system insiders and outsiders, people with an open mind, who are trying to bring innovation to schools. We believe that our "ludic learning approach", inspired by Karen Schrier was very well received, especially after people got to actually play the game. In all honesty, everyone was very excited to play the game! Such a pity, we only had 90 minutes!
It is always so nice to see grownups excited about children's games, sometimes even more excited than the children themselves. And that's exactly what we need in class: teachers with great contagious enthusiasm.
A warm thank you to the organizers of WELS, to our workshop participants and to you, for traveling to Switzerland through this blogpost!
Anne, Maria and Luana
CUiB is back and making waves!
We're beyond excited to tell you that we are back to traveling and sharing CUiB with people who believe in our mission! Well, it's not just people this time, but 800 education experts from 50 countries. Thrilling!
We are honored to have been accepted to WELS, the World Education Leadership Symposium, in Zug, Switzerland. For the last 12 years, the Symposium has been the largest international congress in Europe on education leadership. Hundreds of researchers, professors, school leaders, students, and entrepreneurs will gather to discuss challenges and solutions for future education. We are very excited to have a say in this too!
Our team will be hosting a workshop and a play-session for everyone interested in ludic learning, specifically in how environmental education can be remodeled and improved through play. As you probably know, the board-game CUiB is our first attempt at encouraging children to reflect on climate change and contemplate their role as future global citizens - resilient, kind, empathetic citizens. We believe these values to be fundamental in the context of climate change and the consequences it will entice - migration, social unrest, change of political dynamics, radical lifestyle transformation and so on. Therefore, we are more committed than ever to bring CUiB to as many kids and teachers as possible!
You are kindly invited to follow us on our journey, starting with WELS, next week! We will have live updates on our Facebook Page, from the 25th to the 27th of September! It's so soon, we still have so much to do!
Thanks for reading this!
Luana, Maria, Anne
We take a small step every day
Just put yourself in a kid's shoes. It's a dream to go to school in order to play. We actually made this dream come true by creating an educational board-game through which pupils can play and learn at the same time. It may be true that repetition is crucial for learning, but who would want to repeat a school-class? Yet playing the same game twice is not the craziest thing to do. Every time you play an educational game you extract more knowledge out of it, you observe more details, and you get curious to receive more answers. That is how you might want to grow and learn when you're a kid, without even noticing that you are growing or learning.
As soon as we realized how important games are for transmitting knowledge and how much alternative educational tools are needed in schools, we took the challenge to create CUiB - a board-game for primary-schools. It was indeed a challenge in many respects: to preserve the relevance of the knowledge transmitted in class, but at the same time to simplify; to combine the excitement of winning a game with teaching the value of cooperation; to produce a game when you are not among the consecrated game-producers; and even to get your friends and relatives to play-test the game in order to perfect it.
We developed and produced our initial 50 games thanks to a small European grant and we donated almost all of them to several schools in Romania. We kept just a couple of games with which we participated in several events in Brasov, Bucharest and Berlin. We got invited to play in more schools and in other organizations engaged in educational activities. We gained new members in our team. We took a small step every day. And more steps are still to be taken. Stay tuned!
Climate change and CUiB
We all know that combating climate change is one of the main priorities of mankind today. Last year the United Nations conference in Paris (COP21) ended with maybe the biggest agreement in the history of addressing climate change: urging all parties to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low carbon future. This Paris Agreement requires all its signatory countries to put forward their best efforts through "nationally determined contributions" and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead.
Our organization, Carpaterra Association, takes these challenges seriously, trying to combat climate change through all its actions. From the very beginning of our existence as an organization we pursued objectives such as: protecting nature and developing our natural areas in an environmental-friendly way. With these aims we completed various projects for sustainable development, we built strategies for natural protected areas, and we made efforts in support of community development. As custodians of 6 natural protected areas we carried out practical activities like planting trees, building touristic infrastructure, organizing greening sites and educational camps with children. We also conducted research on multiple species of birds, studying their life and how they are affected by human actions. After 6 years of activities in the field of environmental protection we felt the need to focus on educating young people; helping children to grow up with an environmental-friendly mindset would make it easier for us to achieve our goals.
In this context CUiB was born, one of my most beloved projects.
When Luana came with the idea of making a board-game about birds I was very excited. The idea of making people responsible in relation to others - whether they are other people or birds - captivated me from the beginning. It seemed to be suitable with all of Carpaterra`s activities and goals.
Through CUiB we are trying to encourage children to assume responsibility at an early age and to reflect about their actions in relation to the environment. Every movement on the World-map a CUiB-player makes in the game, allows him to see how a human action affects the Earth. He will see how over-exploitation of forests, extensive agriculture or even windmills affect the environment. Many of these human actions were progressive and well-intended, yet history shows us that humans were never too cautious with the environment.
Elementary needs of the birds like water, food and health are highlighted at every step in the game and always get you thinking about the need for aforethought and well-chosen actions.
Other key elements in the game are the 3 boards built on 3 world-map scenarios situated several decades apart and showing the distribution of resources on the globe now and in the long-term future. This element invites children to reflect and shows them clearly how climate change may affect the entire Earth.
I think this game opens children's minds to think about important matters and helps them understand more clearly what climate change means.
If Americans had played CUiB at the beginning of XX century, maybe they would have commercialized Tesla cars earlier allowing transport to be cheaper and cleaner.
If Beijing residents had played CUiB half century ago, they might have been able to see clearer skies today and wouldn't have been forced to wear the human street-mask.
If a Dutch had played CUiB at the begging of Industrialization, for sure this would have convinced the Queen to donate a game in every school for the country's soil.
Cătălin
Photo credits Ed Hawkins
Last year in spring
We are all happy in spring when migrants come. Aren't we? All the children look forward for the arrival of migrant birds and adults encourage them to feel this way. Why don't we always welcome migrant people with the same joy? Are the migration of birds and the migration of people really that different? Aren't they both being led by similar logics: the satisfaction of basic needs, achieving wellbeing, grounding a family, enjoying the freedom to move?
Last year in spring we started building a board-game with these ideas in mind. That's how we created CUiB, a game about birds and humans. The game is gentle in suggesting the analogy between the migration of birds and the migration of people. It is an educational board-game which teaches not so much by providing answers, but rather by stimulating questions. It increases the interest of young kids in the world around them and develops in them a positive and caring attitude towards nature and towards others. By using the metaphor of migrant birds the game invites each player to be a migrant at least for one hour, understanding better the challenges and hardships of migration, becoming more aware of the importance of cooperation and of the respect for fundamental rights.
We built the game in such a way as to inspire empathy, generosity and respect towards others. For instance, at the end of every round we encourage the young players to exchange or donate each other resources-cards. We discovered to our surprise, when playing with kids, that they were already very empathetic, generous and respectful towards one another. In comparison with how adults played the game, children were much less competitive, sharing and helping each other much more and in a disarmingly honest and enthusiastic way. Kids play the game with a genuine altruism, which adults lack most of the times. Apparently, as time goes by, we learn to compete and often forget to cooperate. CUiB is then relevant in that it helps children preserve their generosity and empathy. Let's support children to grow up in this spirit.
​For more updates please visit our Facebook page CUiB.
CUiB (the game and all related services) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
E-mail: Maria Ercus-Pepine and Luana Martin-Russu
Tel.: +49 157 534 91748 and +49 176 994 12913