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People are more keen to learn and remember when they are feeling something. Think of your best memory and you will find out that it is probably linked with an emotion: fulfilment, ecstasy, inner peace, relief, etc.
The Mexican painter, Jose Clemente Orozco said “Art is Knowledge at the service of emotion”. That is because of this close relationship between art, emotion and education that we work with art so much. Elysée Reclus used poetry to explain geology, Edgar P. Jacob used comic books to talk about geopolitics, Hervé Tullet wrote a children's book to teach the basics of coding, and so on. We can use art to teach anything: Sciences, Digital tools, our cities’ heritage, etc.
But how to reach the audience with art in our busy world? Children are losing their interest in Museums and libraries and grown-ups, over solicited by online networks, have less mind space available. To overcome these challenges, our partner La Fabulerie creates, tests, and shares educational techniques and tools, used as levers of digital, arts and culture to reach the audience, that will be showcased within the Mimesis project.
Working on it for more than 14 years, they are offering these golden rules :
Tell a story (storytelling)
Involve all senses (sight, hearing, touch, balance, etc…)
Make the most of gamification techniques. Look at what works (video games, escape games..) and reproduce it
The audience should keep a souvenir of their journey and leave a trace
Use digital interfaces for their strengths (interactivity, challenges) while keeping the cold technological look away (screens on painting frame for example).
Beauty is the key!
Of course, it takes a lot of time and work to create a beautiful story, gamified, with an educational purpose. But with motivation, and a few skills that can be learned quickly, it is at everyone’s fingertips!
What we do is not specific to us, all around the world the educational community is busy trying to find ways to reach the people in our digital era. In the Mimesis project, we partnered with organisations that act in different fieds and with different tools, but share the same ambitions: finding ways for education.