Source: MIL-OSI Submissions
Source: KiComms
Tuesday 20th July 2021: A world first online gaming platform, Katuku Island, that supports indigenous education, will be launched this week and will be free to download on Apple and Google Play.
The game is the upshot of a Māori academic’s master’s degree and doctoral research to close the gap for indigenous peoples and to learn how culture can create resilience.
Katuku Island is an original storyline adapted to a player survival game with an indigenous overlay. Players must make their way to the only uncontaminated place in the world, Katuku Island. Along the way players must create their player avatars designed to look like Māori warriors with tribal tattoos, design Māori weapons, build tribes and escape the crumbling cities. Throughout the game, the player must undertake game challenges, like literacy and decision making. It uses gaming, fun and cultural elements to push the learner to excel in problem solving.
Dr Phyllis Callaghan and late husband Matua Craig Callaghan both worked in the education sector and have committed their lives to Māori education. Initially this drove them to write a textbook called 16-year-old Māori Boy, which has supported not only Māori youth at school, but also Māori in the justice system, on their educational journey.
Dr Callaghan says that the idea has been constantly evolving and morphed into developing a 3D Indigenous game that supports educational development in literacy, in an environment that signifies Māori and Indigenous cultural codes in all aspects of the game.
“It has allowed an about-face of power and ascertained that students with minimal education can get a second chance at learning. They are able to master cultural talents, which come naturally to them, such as toi (art) or whakairo (carving). These codes had often lain dormant throughout their mainstream education and were overshadowed by negative codes they’d endured at school, such as racism.
“Māori do not have positive educational statistics. Much of the research tells us that Māori do not fare well in the subject of English, and the gap in the New Zealand schooling systems between Māori students and non-Māori students is widening. Poverty plays a huge part to these statistics. But gains are being made and the environment changing”. Dr Callaghan says
Katuku Island meets global tech stretch disciplines (the research or the innovation behind the tool). Elements of tech stretch involve collaboration, learner agency, goal setting and real-time assessment. When the cultural gaming elements and the tech stretch components collide, we expect maximum learning outcomes, creating the impetus, self-efficacy and agency for the learner to undertake gaming and educational challenges confidently and successfully, thus increasing learner effectiveness and learner resilience to become the master of their domain.
“The science and data collection became both quantitative and qualitative. Too many times we allow quantitative to be the measurement, but you can’t accurately measure trauma within a mathematical equation, Māori have known that mai rā anō (from long ago). The learning journey from Katuku Island could help to unpack past trauma or bad educational experiences and move players forward, creating better social and economic outcomes for themselves”.
All artists and graphic designers who have worked on the design of the characters and visuals for Katuku Island, hail from award winning whakairo programme run out of Tūranga Tane (Gisborne Boys High School) and developed by Dr Callaghan’s late husband, Craig Callaghan.
Katuku Island is aimed at indigenous peoples across the globe, from six-year-olds onwards, with the player able to access instant feedback throughout the game. The launch on 22 July will be livestreamed on the Katuku Island Facebook page.
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Katuku-Island-670140906734517
Website: https://www.katukuisland.com/
