New partnership

7 oktober 2022

Serious gaming: learning through play with Game Tailors

“Programming and gaming started at a very early age for both of us,” says Olivier Hokke. “A strong passion that developed towards serious gaming, where the game takes on another purpose besides entertainment: interactive learning.” Together with associate Bas Dado, he founded Game Tailors a few years ago. Game Tailors is a software company that puts games at the very center of education.

We came into contact with Olivier and his team, and immediately saw the overlap of their vision and approach with the Awareways philosophy, approach and programs. A collaboration was, in so many words, inevitable. So let’s introduce Game Tailors!

Game Tailors

The company has been called Game Tailors for just about two years now, but for a bit of an origin story we have to go back a little further than that. To their student days, to be precise. Eager to learn and thirsting for technical challenges, both Olivier and Bas ended up at TU Delft studying Computer Graphics. Subsequently, they got to know each other at the Master Computer Science. Cooperation during and after college led to projects for TU Delft Gamelab, which eventually formed the basis of what is now Game Tailors.

“Since that time we have operated as a power couple, with Bas as back-end developer and myself more on the front-end, but with a shared vision. We are now continuing this in our company, with a focus on educational material: games for learning. We develop these games based on research, for example into the right game form for certain age groups. ‘How are you drawn towards the game, what are the best game techniques for this subject matter,’ those are the kind of questions at the heart of that.”

The next level is storytelling, framing the game. And then development: getting it working, getting the level of gameplay, and improving upon all that on an ongoing basis.”

Olivier Hokke en Bas Dado

KlankKr8: the power of sound

A good example is KlankKr8, a serious games design commissioned by the RID, a Dutch institute for Dyslexia. ‘KlankKr8’ is play on words, ‘klank’ meaning ‘sound’ or ‘tone’, and ‘kr8’ meaning ‘power’ (‘eight’ in Dutch is ‘acht’, so ‘kr8’ becomes ‘kracht’, the Dutch word for ‘power’). “The aim of the game is to improve the sound-sign linkage in children, especially children with dyslexia. This involves using different gameplay techniques and ‘juicy’ graphics to make it as interesting and fun as possible.”

Supervisors can also monitor children’s statistics and progress on a website – which in turn is a logical bridge to Awareways’ managed security awareness training, which also provides a dashboard for monitoring.

Collaboration

To get a better grip on your target audience, sometimes you have to charme them, enchant them. “After all, the gripping magic of a customized game can help with awareness and learning.” That’s Olivier and Bas’ philosophy that has quite a bit of overlap with the elements of gamification in our approach. For exactly that reason, we have involved Game Tailors in the development of games for various components of our learning platform.

There are also more than a few similarities in vision, such as research as a starting point for development, developing a creative method that works and sticks, and presenting a product that makes learning fun while keeping an eye on accessibility. For us to achieve a sustainable behavioral change in our target audience, for Game Tailors to make learning more accessible and effective for young and old. “And then to enjoy it when our solutions really make a difference!”

Het team van Game Tailors aan de slag

Ga·mi·fi·ca·tion: the application of elements of game play – including interaction, point scoring and competition – in a non-game context to encourage engagement and commitment.
You can find our whitepaper on the benefits of gamification here

About Game Tailors

Want to know more about Game Tailors?
Then check out gametailors.com.

You can find more information about KlankKr8,
but also about projects such as Bouke Bouwt,
a language game for children with a
language development disorder, and Digikwis,
an app to help elderly people
learning digital skills.

Interesting in working together? Get in touch!

Kennismaken met Game Tailors

Do you want to know more about our approach to information security, or would you like to find out what Awareways and our partners can do for you? Contact us!