The Polish Government has announced that they will be running a series of educational initiatives centered around games while Polish children are at home due to the coronavirus.
The games themselves were created by the Lublin GameDev foundation, which will have kids work on game design, prototyping, Unity Engine use, scripting basics, and other topics. There will also be a game jam that will last 120 hours along with a Minecraft server, with the Polish Government asking people to create replicas of well-known buildings in Minecraft.
Earlier in March, Poland (along with most of the world) closed their schools in order to keep people distanced from one another and to try and halt the spread of the virus. This leaves a lot of kids that are at home and learning how to deal with boredom and not much else, so Poland has launched Grarantanna which offers webinars, quizzes, streaming, tournaments, puzzles, and game competitions such as the ones mentioned above.
The historical quizzes, for instance, offer a way for students to learn about their nation's history that hopefully won't be boring. For the best players the Polish Government has prepared sets of historical board games as prizes. Lucky buggers.
There are 40 puzzles as well to go through, which include mathematics and language puzzles. By solving them, players will test their knowledge, focus, concentration, and meticulousness.
High School students that want to participate as well can win cool prizes such as a gaming laptop, smartphone, and a camera. To do so, they will have to join a Facebook group and complete some tasks.
There will even be some online RPG sessions that will be run as well, with the first sessions having taken place on March 19.
For more information (as the translated page from Polish is surprisingly readable) be sure to go here.
Quick Take:
This actually looks kind of cool, actually. I would have definitely loved to have something like this back when I was in school, and not the weird programs that the Ontario Government tried to foist on us unsuspecting kids. This isn't incredible stuff or anything, but it looks much more relevant then playing with blocks that ask the player what 3 + 3 equals when you're 9-10 years old.
What do you think of this news? Do you think that the Polish Government has the right idea? Let us know in the comments!
