Educational gaming in Israel

News and activity around educational technology and gaming tends overwhelmingly to focus on the USA. But there is another edtech hub which is quietly booming; Israel is the latest edtech success story you haven’t heard of. Edugameshub put on our investigative hats, fired up Skype and began asking questions.

A long history

Avi Warshavsky from MindCet

My first contact was Avi Warshavsky, CEO of MindCet, an organisation devoted to encouraging and nurturing Israel’s edtech sector. Avi is a veteran of Israel’s edtech sector (which, he informed me, stretches back 40 years). MindCet is an organisation whose mission is to bring together entrepreneurs, educators and researchers, to create groundbreaking edtech both in Israel and further afield. They act as an accelerator, hosting startups for 6 months or more, as well as housing a small research unit, running regular hackathons and lectures and linking startups with teachers and academics. I asked him why he thought educational technology was booming in Israel. “It’s a very flexible place, with a multicultural population and a vivid, dynamic startup scene.” Despite having a population of only 7 million (not much larger than Scotland), it seems many Israelis have been bitten by the startup bug. Avi thinks that the mixture of Jewish, Arabic and English language, plus a mixture of socio-economic groups adds more dynamism to the mix, and points me towards several edtech products as examples.

A hackathon at MindCet

MindCet’s most mature startup is Wikibrains, an online brainstorming tool which uses crowd-sourced mind maps.

Avi also gave me an example of an innovative Israeli educational game. Road Story (still in private beta) is a game designed to give young children a sense of time and space, via the narrative of an car journey. Anyone with kids who incessantly ask “how long until we get there?” will appreciate how useful such a game could be.

Limitations

I asked Avi about some of the limitations faced by edtech companies in Israel. There is little government funding, for example, and there are some old-fashioned attitudes towards edtech and its capabilities. “Put a computer in a classroom and students will learn” is a common misconception. Israel itself is a fairly small market, but Avi is optimistic about market opportunities in Asia and Europe, markets he sees as being more open and interesting that the conservative US.

International success

While i was writing this article, Edsurge published a story about a Tel Aviv-based educational gaming company called TabTale, which raised $12 million dollars in VC funding. TabTale reaches well beyond Israel, with over 240 edutainment apps, and plans to use its new funds to purchase other edugaming companies to add to its stable.

Where games and instructional design meet

Shachar Oz, games designer

A keen networker and facilitator, Shachar sees part of his role as evangelising about the potential of educational gaming to teachers, and bringing an understanding of instructional design to the edtech developer community.

Living in the Holy Land – an educational RPG

Both Avi and Shachar emphasised the key role of collaboration in forming successful edtech collaborations, and this seems to be another feature of the Israeli edtech melting pot: teachers, researchers and developers making themselves available to work with and to educate each other. Edugameshub thinks many other countries could learn from the Israeli example. Links to useful institutions and research papers are available below.

References

CET (Center for Educational Technology)
MindCet
MindCet’s paper on educational gaming
Shachar’s blog
Wikibrains
Joytunes
Timocco