Futurescool

"The event"

Getting young adults to think about the future and teaching them

educational lessons in a playful form, this was the purpose of our

‘Mission impossible’

26 September, our first lesson "Future Thinking" by Thomas, it was a subject most of us

had never heard of. Some thought we were going to predict the future, others thought

this subject was going to be about AI. It quickly becomes clear that none of this turned

out to be true, I can still remember very well the first lesson of this course. There was an

outage on campus which meant no wifi, so this also meant no slide show. "How can we

learn about the future if we don't even have wifi?" Thought I. That lesson Thomas

thoroughly explained the contribution of this subject, if we learn about the past, why

would see younger nothing about the future?

What’s Future Thinking?

Through several smaller assignments, then, it quickly becomes clear that the future is not fixed, everyone has a different view of the future. This view did turn out to be strongly influenced by society, a lot of people look negatively at the future and think of nuclear weapons and Ai taking over everything. This is just one of the possible futures out there, and we wanted to somehow make that clear to the rest of our generation.

We were given the opportunity to determine our own final project, a "Mission Impossible" as Thomas liked to call it. Thomas helped us define this project, after a good brainstorming of more than 100 ideas we chose 4 to test out.

In groups of 3 we got to work and after about 2 weeks we presented the different projects. The first group proposed a website, a website where we wanted to give people more explanations about the future, we looked at certain predictions and how they turned out to be true or not in retrospect. Another group had the idea of creating a tiktok page where we could use small short videos to teach youth about future literacy.

The 3rd group got to work on a Fortnite game, this way young people could learn while having fun. After these 3 presentations we saw the potential of all these ideas and decided to create Futurescool 2 combination of all these.

Let’s do this!

No sooner said than done, after a few

brainstorms later we decided to create 4 worlds where the players could search for coins and thus complete the game. We flew in, most of us had never made a game in Fortnite before but we learned quickly and after a few weeks we had already built a few futures in Fortnite. Together with what we already had as a website and Tiktok we showed this to Thomas. He was positive, the world was

starting to look nice and so Thomas was confident that it was going to look nice. Still, there were a few things that were not yet up and running, how do we get educational learning goals incorporated into the Fortnite game and thus how do we ensure that the young people who play our game actually learn something about future thinking. With this feedback we set to work, in each world there were 3 coins that players could collect to buy an item that could

lead them to the next world. The 3 coins were not always hard to find so we thought to work with hints, hints that players could obtain by answering questions such as "are there different futures". If players answered these questions correctly (which for here is "yes") they would get a hint. We thought this was the best way to get people to answer questions without imposing them too much.

We set up 12 questions that the players could answer for a hint, some questions had correct answers and some questions were there to make the players think about what the future might be, an example of such a question is "do you think humanity will solve global warming?". Finally, we created a space that players started in and a world where they were rewarded if they completed all 4 worlds.

Finish in sight…

Besides the Fortnite map, of course, we also had the website and our Tiktok page. The website was expanded piece by piece, in the final phase all 4 different worlds were thoroughly explained and you could find additional info from Jim Dator's theory. We took eachele atmospheric images of students while they were playing the game to give the readers of the site in this way some more clarity about what our goal is. We didn't stand still on Tiktok either, the first 2 weeks we posted relatively few Tiktoks but when Thomas said we could go up a step we posted a Tiktok almost daily. Generally these videos didn't do too well, though we did have a few that had over a thousand Futurescool 3 viewers. After a while we realized that tiktok was not the best way to spread our event, we only had 50 followers on our account after 3 months. We pivoted to LinkedIn and Facebook to make some noise there during the last weeks of our project.

What’s next?

Now that the project is behind us, we can still say that we are proud of what we

accomplished during this period. The end result is a fortnite game that is fundamentally

sound but with room for improvement. It was cool to see the different reactions of

people at the opening event of our game. Our time is up but we hope to see this project

go to new heights, this would not only be great for us but for the whole youth because

this way young adults are more and more aware of what future thinking means.

Do you want to know when our map will launch? Or when there will be an update? Leave your email down below and we will let you know!

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