Immersive Edutainment for Foundational Competencies Challenge

How can we develop an immersive, interactive game-based platform to significantly enhance student engagement and mastery of foundational competencies?

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Immersive Edutainment for Foundational Competencies Challenge

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Challenge Statement

Bridging the Pedagogical Divide: Integrating Foundational Mastery into Immersive Digital Landscapes

How can we develop an immersive, interactive game-based platform to significantly enhance student engagement and mastery of foundational competencies?

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE) is seeking solution providers to develop an integrated, real-time edutainment platform that unifies foundational learning with high-fidelity gameplay. This solution must leverage existing pedagogical standards to deliver a centralized environment of educational progress without the need for additional hardware installations. However, we are open to evaluating proposals for new, innovative technology that can scale across the national curriculum.

Your solution should combine advanced analytics, adaptive AI, and intuitive visual dashboards to provide actionable insights into student mastery, engagement levels, and cross-competency performance. The goal is to enhance educational efficiency, support smarter resource planning, and improve the overall student journey through a seamless, data-driven, and scalable edutainment solution.

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A novel Assistive Technology Recommendation System based on Assessment

How can we develop an immersive, interactive game-based platform to significantly enhance student engagement and mastery of foundational competencies?

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Qatar is committed to enhancing student achievement and engagement, particularly in foundational competencies assessed by global benchmarks such as PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. Despite continuous efforts to innovate and optimise educational outcomes, traditional teaching methods face challenges in fully engaging students, who increasingly interact with stimulating environments such as gaming and social media outside of school. This creates a noticeable gap in classroom engagement, impacting students' motivation, performance, and overall learning outcomes. Existing digital learning platforms primarily utilise traditional education methods enhanced with gamification elements, such as points and leaderboards. While these have slightly increased engagement, they fall short of the immersive experiences that students expect based on their interactions with contemporary gaming environments. Current international game-based educational solutions lack the flexibility to adapt content to align with Qatar’s specific curriculum and cultural context, severely limiting their applicability and impact. Qatar’s curriculum is specific in several ways, as it’s based on Islamic values. Therefore the schooling model is gender-segregated (boys’ and girls’ schools/classes), which necessitates separate virtual spaces, sessions and leaderboards. Therefore, there is an urgent need for an innovative edutainment platform that reverses the traditional model, delivering engaging, game-based environments that seamlessly embed educational content. The ideal solution will offer high flexibility, enabling educators to easily tailor content and adapt it to the curriculum, while being culturally relevant and available in Arabic, respecting Qatar’s Islamic cultural values.

Key Objectives:

Enhanced Student Engagement: Deliver immersive, interactive, and engaging game-based learning experiences that significantly improve students' intrinsic motivation and active participation in learning.
Curriculum Alignment and Adaptability: Provide a highly customizable platform that allows educators to easily create, modify, and tailor interactive virtual environments to align with the Qatari curriculum.
Adequate Mastery of Core Competencies: Demonstrably improve students' mastery of foundational competencies, particularly in mathematics and science, as evaluated by both national and international benchmarks.
Enhancement of Test Preparation: Current test preparation techniques could benefit from a more interactive and applied approach to support deeper comprehension and retention.

Technical requirements:

The ideal solution would meet the following requirements:

Immersive and Interactive Gameplay: The solution must offer an immersive gaming environment where educational content is seamlessly integrated into engaging narratives, scenarios, and interactions. In other words, a game-based educational environment, not an educational environment with gamification elements.
Multi-User and Interactive Capabilities: Students should not only be able to interact with virtual objects but also collaborate with peers, and engage in hands-on simulated experiments. Multiplayer or collaborative modes should allow students to learn together in a shared virtual space.
Educator-Friendly Customisation Tools: Include intuitive builder tools that allow educators to create or adjust virtual worlds, scenarios, characters, and educational content without requiring extensive technical skills.
Adaptive AI-driven Learning: Incorporate adaptive AI capabilities that personalise the difficulty level and progression based on real-time student performance, ensuring optimal learning experiences.
Arabic Language and Cultural Relevance: Provide robust support for Arabic language (including right-to-left text alignment) and the ability to integrate culturally relevant characters, scenarios, and narratives.
Multi-platform Accessibility: Ensure compatibility with standard computer equipment (tablets, laptops, browsers) and optionally with VR-, AR headsets or other accessories, maintaining broad accessibility across schools.
Arabic-first content moderation: Gender segregated, closed school-only identities, teacher controlled live session, full auditability, camera/mic use, chat and avatar customization in line with school policy.
Security and Compliance: Adhere strictly to Qatari cybersecurity and data privacy regulations, with all student data hosted securely within Qatar.
System integration: In the future, the potential to integrate with Learning Management Systems (LMSs) using industry standard protocols such as xAPI or LTI.

Performance Criteria:

The performance of the solution will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. However, two aspects are essential in judging the performance of solutions:

Level of engagement: The engagement of students, as measured by the time they are active, the frequency of their activity, and the knowledge gained, are key performance indicators. Ultimately, we are looking to increase the foundational competencies assessed by global benchmarks like PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, so these are long(er) term indicators of the effectiveness of the solution
Teacher experience: the ease of use of the solution from a teacher's perspective in daily usage, as well as course creation and adaptation, is another important criterion.

Cost targets will be determined on a case-by-case basis

Phase 1: POC development: Q4 2025 - Q1 2026.
Phase 2: Commercial roll-out: to be determined on a case-by-case basis

If successful, the platform can scale to all schools in Qatar. The Qatari educational system is highly regarded in the MENA region; therefore, a rollout in Qatar is considered a good base for further commercial rollout in the MENA region. We are therefore open to solution providers deploying their solutions with other players.

Cash contributions from QRDI:
Up to 100,000 USD to support the POC development, depending on the project proposal.

In-kind contributions:

Access to Data and Analytics: De-identified student performance data to improve personalisation algorithms.
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Experts available to consult, review outcomes, and provide domain-specific insights.
Piloting Opportunities: Select schools available for real-world testing and refinement of the solution.
Teacher and Student Feedback: Direct access to educators and students to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback on usability and impact.

We are seeking SMEs and startups with solutions that can be implemented within a relatively short timeframe (TRL of 6 and higher). For Background IP (BIP), both parties will retain their respective IPs bought into the project. In the event of new Foreground IP (FIP) creation, MoEHE is agreeable to the FIP being retained by the solution provider with a perpetual use license for MoEHE and schools in Qatar.

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