Traditional schooling places little value on creativity and, in Hong Kong, rote memorization reigns as the de facto learning approach. Prof. Catherine McBride (centre) in CUHK’s Department of Psychology and Dr. Yanling Zhou (left), an assistant professor at the Education University of Hong Kong, teamed up with international business expert Mr. Helmuth Aberer (right) to found Cayan Educational Design Ltd.
BumperCards, the startup’s first game, emphasizes creativity. Children can play in Chinese or English; the goal is to combine cards to make compound words. With BumperCards, there is a premium placed on creativity. Players receive one point for normal words (e.g., sunflower), while ‘silly’ words, such as ‘ice-mouse’, are worth double. For nonexistent words, players are rewarded rather than penalized. Conceptually, BumperCards stands antithetical to traditional learning.
‘We want to reveal how impactful gamification is. Gamification improves retention and participation. Many educators think if you have fun, you won’t learn. We’re disproving this,’ explains Professor McBride.
Professor McBride’s research group has tested thousands of students across several languages. BumperCards is built upon research although wide-scale implementation starts with convincing parents of this approach. ‘If we ask kids to be creative, parents are afraid of this. If a child does something “wrong” parents believe their child has a problem. We have to convince parents otherwise,’ says Professor McBride.
There are two primary avenues of problem-solving: divergent and convergent thinking. Discovering multiple solutions to an open-ended problem is divergent, while convergent thinking entails converging on one answer. ‘Out of all the toys and games we’ve seen, only ours combines convergent and divergent thinking. We’ve created a revolutionary game,’ says Mr. Aberer.
Cayan Educational Design Ltd aims to combine the values of an NGO with commercialization. ‘We have a social and commercial goal,’ says Mr. Aberer. ‘We distribute the game to kindergartens and NGOs at a low price while we license it to a corporation for scale.’
Cayan Educational Design Ltd is tasked with integrating an unconventional idea into schools cemented in orthodoxy. Yet, as generations evolve so must education. BumperCards may be the catalyst for more creative students for years to come.
Phil Rosen
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