The educational board game Expedition Mundus teaches 12-year olds to think like a scientist. It has been used by many Young Academies in the past few years, and has been translated into several languages. Now, a more digital version, serving as an improvement of the Mundus game is (almost) ready to play. The web application was developed during the past few years by the Young Academy of Belgium and the Dutch Young Academy.
The digital addition facilitates and visually stimulates the game experience in class rooms. The app only requires one smart board (or computer and screen/projector) and one smartphone, tablet or computer (and, of course, an internet connection). The web application functions as a guide and has an easy, straightforward menu (where the documents can also be downloaded) and start-up. Once started, it offers a continuously updated overview of the game progress and can (or cannot) show a score-board for the teams playing and sorts the in-game answers already found.
Although the source documents are still needed in printed form, the application highly reduces the costs of (printing and sorting) a novel edition of the game. The many small cards with questions are not needed anymore and users can easily print pages with several questions on one page to distribute to the teams. The digitalization thus enhances the playability (especially for the play leader), the structural support (for both players and play leader), reduces the cost to redistribute it and improves the game’s attractiveness and game experience. By design the digital add-on is easily translatable in many languages.
The Young Academy of Belgium envisages in 2020 to launch the (open access) web version of Expedition Mundus and to distribute a new, smaller box with source materials and game manual to all Flemish schools after eliminating the last few bugs and finalizing the local partnerships for hosting, print and support.
The Young Academy of Belgium is very eager to hear from other Young Academies who are interested to use Expedition Mundus digital in the future. Please contact them at info (at) jongeacademie.be.
