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This proposal is about education; education in a much broader sense than we sometimes talk about at Wada. We will incorporate blockchain components such as d****igital token, micro-payments and decenralized identity solution (DID) into the platform, meaning the technology behind the scenes will be on Cardano and also in the prize money, which will be distributed in stable coins or Ada (based on our market research). However one of our great priorities at Wada is preserving indigenous culture, and through this proposal our educational focus is also going to center around African heritage (specific to Cameroon as applicable).
Context
In recent years, the relationship between educators and students in Cameroon has suffered a great deal. Students exposure to colonial languages (English and French) combined with a multitude of local languages (200+ languages in Cameroon) has brought about a new melange of languages called "ARGO" which is basically a mix. This has been a huge hurdle for communication and knowledge dispersion in general. However it is something we should be encouraging in our youth. It has become almost a new dialect/slang. This language barrier is one of the 5 areas where we would like to focus our education efforts.
In addition to this, we see more and more youth getting into gaming–from sports betting to online gaming. In a sense, the gaming world has taken over in families as well as in schools, but educators for the most part seem unwilling to upgrade their teaching practices to integrate more fun, which pushes youth away from their studies to waste their down time in meaningless gambling and gaming. Mentalyse is here to provide an outlet for youth to play, but make the games educational as well as profitable.
Interestingly, our ancestors were acutely aware of the power of learning trough games and used this approach extensively in educating youth. I myself realized the power of this approach a few years ago when I came across a video
from Simon Peyton Jon, one of the creators of Haskell that summarizes this concept. Here kids are asked to solve a complex sorting exercise in computer science, yet they are able to have fun and actually get to a solution through tackling the problem as a game. Six years ago Andre started a paper version (Magazine) <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rfsJe4pPS-dnuZny-b2-WQkeGzgwjG2-/view?usp=sharing> of our idea that concluded with the creation of a weekly magazine containing exercises grouped in 5 module each addressing a specific aspect of the problem. For a while the prototype magazine was distributed to primary and middle school students. The feedback was great. The missing peace was handling micropayment transactions (triggered when buy a weekly magazine) and the solution we considered was working with Mobile Money Operators (MTN, Orange and Nexttel) but that turned out to be more expensive. We now have the chance through Cardano scalability solutions.
Solution
Our solution is to bring an off-chain solution (that has already been developed) on chain and more specifically to Cardano! Our learning approach and model has been centered around 5 challenge categories that each have their own area of focus. The main strategy is to embrace the mental learning model of students (learn though fun) and adapt to modern learning tools (games, inter-schools collaboration and competitions). We intend to organize competitions at the national level between schools so that we can extend the individual aspect of our bi-weekly magazine to groups and schools. All of this at a very small fee for participants (digital coin). We also intend to build a donation module to open the door to community members that are very aware of these issues but lack a platform to address them.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia55clAtdMs>
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Our proposal is a great tool for educators, parents and even the government to embrace positive aspects of modernity while promoting culture and leveraging the interest kids already have in games. We are offering young students an alternative to sport gambling plus adding the bonus of learning their culture. This makes our platform and approach a nation wide instrument to solve this issue.
Our solution will incorporate DID to handle identities within the platform. We will create a digital token pegged to the value of the local fiat currency to handle massive micro-payments we anticipate within the platform. These two aspects address the national potential for such an application, as it has a huge potential to reach across the nation to solve some key issues we face here in Cameroon.
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The main risk that we've identified is having low levels of interest in the content of the game as they are more educational than sport-like. One way we will mitigate this risk by incorporating competitions ( individual to individual, group vs group and inter-schools) with prizes bringing in the economic motivation aspect that sport betting has.