Type: story-based pervasive mobile game
Purpose: raise awareness and interest towards forestry among school children in rural Kenyan areas.
Place: Eldoret, Kenya
Technologies: Android, onboard sensors
Period: 2012-
Contributors: Teemu H. Laine, Marcus Duveskog, Javier Arevalo, Ville Räisänen, Moses Wakanyi, Sammy Mwirotsi, Kevin Kiptoo, Andrew Orina, Tabby Mungai and others.
EntVenture is a pervasive adventure game on Android platform (both tablets and phones) for raising awareness and interest towards forestry among school children in rural Kenyan areas. The game is also to be used by University of Eldoret in outreach activities for the community, for showcasing the opportunities of new learning technologies to students and staff at the university and to make it available to a wider audience where anyone with an Android phone with an interest in Kenyan forestry can download it from the Internet and learn more about forestry in Kenya. A Secondary objective of the Entventure development project was to give the participating computer science and forestry students know-how which could be valuable for their future careers. This objective was encouraged by our previous experience with student-driven development of the Bagamoyo Caravan.
In the game, the player is guided by the Ent character through various forestry related topics such as managing a tree nursery, uses of different trees and the importance of forests for sustaining life. The player must solve various quizzes releated to forests in order to proceed in the game. The quizzes have relevance to the surrounding forest at the University of Eldoret. EntVenture also consists of three embedded minigames – a word search, picture puzzle and a balancing game. The foundations and the concept of embedding entertaining minigames into a pedagogical story were adopted from the Bagamoyo Caravan game. Figures below illustrate quizzes and minigames in EntVenture. You can download the game from Google Play.
EntVenture was created as part of the HEI-ICI project “Improving forestry education in Kenya” which was funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Regional Council of North Karelia.