Fostering teenagers’ motivation towards peace culture workshops using gamification

Abstract

Multipropaz Foundation, a non-profit organization, tries to prevent violence among teenagers through formative workshops in a vulnerable zone in Cali Colombia. This foundation uses an active methodology focused on teamwork and personal growth, which helps teenagers build a life project and promote a peace culture. Teenager’s sustained participation is key to achieve the expected outcomes; i.e., develop life skills, such as creative conflict resolution and leadership, and strengthen teenager’s potential. However, Multipropaz has detected an intermittent participation from students resulting in a lack of adherence to the formative workshops, which may prevent students who desert or participate occasionally from achieving the expected outcomes. In this paper, we present Freiya, a user-centred gamified application developed to address the identified lack of adherence from teenagers. The motivation of a group of teenagers towards the use of Freiya as a complementary tool in a workshop was assessed using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI). The results of the evaluation showed that most teenagers felt motivated using the application as part of the workshop. Thus, we argue that the employed approach to address teenagers’ lack of motivation using gamification may be effective. Freiya is planned to be extended to generate a more interactive environment for teenagers during formative workshops.