PING is an online game made for secondary schools, forming a starting point to discuss the subject ‘poverty’ and what it means to be poor. Ping is aimed at the students of the secondary and third degree. The students become the main characters in the game. They can choose between Jim or Sofia, who, due to certain circumstances, end up on the street and need to find their own path.
PING shows that games can help to introduce complex social subjects like poverty in the class room.
The partners of the PING project want to contribute to the social debate encouraging the use of games at school as a tool to open the difficult discussion about poverty.
PING was made possible with the help of The King Baudouin Foundation (Belgium), IBBT (Belgium), with The Network of European Foundations, the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Germany) , the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal/UK) and Fondation Bernheim (Belgium).
Play the game on line or download PING.
For the development of the game there was an intensive collaboration with the European Schoolnet (umbrella organization consisting of 31 ministries of education from the European member states) and the European Poverty Network (umbrella organization of poverty organizations from the European member states) to make games discussable in an educational context. The manual and game will be distributed in all secondary schools in Belgium with the support of the Belgian government.
PING was internationally launched on October 20th 2010 at the European convention “Poverty is not a game. Serious Games as a mean to discuss complex societal issues” in Brussels.
The game and manual are now available on the website.
Also available in Nederlands, Français, and Deutsch
