Game of Words - Add the ‘fun’ factor to your learnings

The Indian education system is quite large and fragmented. Here, everybody has their own style and method of teaching, and every student’s grasping power also differs. In today’s world of high competition, it is necessary to excel in competitive exams and get the desired seats.

Exams like CAT, GRE, GMAT are known to be some of the toughest exams and any amount of preparation seems less for these exams. There are numerous books, study materials, previous questions papers and tons of material available for these competitive exams. But what if you could get some fun ways to prepare for such competitive exams?

Yes, you got it right! FUN ways to PREPARE for competitive exams – all thanks to Yogi Raj, the brain behind the startup called the “Game of Words”. Yogi is very passionate about learning, creativity and design. He has been working for several initiatives in the field of education to fuel creative thinking and innovation that transforms the current mundane way of delivery of education. One of such initiative was “Why? Newton” – a national story sharing platform for engineering students to share their stories of innovation and entrepreneurship. Later, Yogi was involved with some leading educational startups helping them gamify educational content for children of age 5-15 years.

Today,his startup  the Game of words offers different education related games for different audience. Game of Words is their first commercial product and is targeted towards students preparing for competitive exams such CAT, GRE, GMAT etc. Other students who are interested in learning new words in a fun way can also benefit from this. Games help in greater retention of words and therefore, one need not mug-up the words in traditional boring way. With 2, 3, 4, 5 rounds of game, players have learned more than 10 words in a day with greater retention.

The game will be soon available in 1, 3 and 5 packs and soon more words will be launch with upto 2-3000 words. The words are picked from competitive exam vocabulary, therefore helpful for aspirants to learn words in a fun way. Indeed, word lovers can cherish this too.

Working professionals, parents, words enthusiasts can also play the game, it is indeed fun! Game of Words’ Urban version includes urban words with fun meaning and is a unique game that can be played during parties or hangouts. Some restaurants and pubs have approached them to place these games at their tables as well as giveaway to their patrons.

How to play?

Game of Words has 52 cards (52 words), picked from GRE/CAT list, and they are grouped in 13 sets of 4 synonyms each. One can play Rummy using 13 cards where the goal is to match synonyms to win hands. The player who makes 4 hands first, wins the game. Similarly, Rummy can be played with 2, 3, 5, 7 cards between 2 to 5 players.

An individual can also play Solitaire by matching the synonyms instead of colors as in regular playing cards. More games such as Bluff, Flash (more than 20 games) can also be played. In fact, people can create their own games using the set of cards.

Apart from Game of words, the other game is ZOODU, a trump game based on animal classification. It includes 200 animals (on 200 cards) classified under different phylum, class, order, genus and species and ranked based on the number of species in each section. Thousands of articles, websites and books have been referred to create this ranking. 2-10 people can play this in classroom setting and can help learn the animal classification in a fun way for biology students of class XI and XII.

The whole idea of this startup came to Yogi when he was working on digital games for a client where is he was responsible for converting management lessons in to fun games so that children could learn about leadership, economics, ethics and such other topics that make tomorrow’s leaders. While creating these games, it clicked to him that a startup journey is full of risks due to different issues and situations. He compared the journey of a startup with a game of Snake and Ladder game, where one will encounter the risks of Snakes and opportunity of Ladders. This experience of creating fun games, and his comparison of risks with snakes & Ladder led him to create -  VYRAL, his first board game on entrepreneurship based on Snakes and Ladder game dynamics. The concept was appreciated among leaders at CBSE as a fun classroom project. Although it wasn’t a commercial idea then, but a good start for many more ideas such as ZOODU, a trump game on animal classification, Game of Words (Classic, Junior and others in pipeline).

The team intends to reach out to a wider audience worldwide with Game of Words and also plans to release next versions of Game of Words Junior (for under 12 age group) and other versions. This team has been approached by NGOs who would like to donate these games to kids, and hence Game of words is also going to move in the social direction. By the end of this year, they plan to launch more games on different subjects. As this is their core hobby, there are myriads of topics/subjects that they are working on for gamification. They have also started partnering with different ecommerce sites, book stores serving diverse audience to ensure products reach out to its audience.

Kudos to Yogi Raj for this amazingly well built startup to ease out the burden of studies on youth. This fun way of learning is definitely going to catch up like a fire and is soon going to become the inthing.

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