Kippie Harnessing Power of Mobile Games to Help Young People

Kippie based in Derry, is one of five organisations that have been chosen to take part in the Social Innovation Skills programme, funded by the Building Change Trust and delivered by WorkWest and Enterprise North West.

It works with young people to help them have a positive future by harnessing their potential and teach them programming, coding basics and how to build and sell their own computer games

Katherine Rowlandson a partner in Kippie believes the project has huge potential.

“The unemployment rate in the new Derry and Strabane super council area for September is almost twice that of the average in the North. Sixty seven per cent of young people see the future outside Northern Ireland. They do not feel listened to. We want to listen to them, work with them, and use their knowledge, skills and experiences to help other young people.”

KIppie wants to provide a space for these young people to teach them skills that benefits not only themselves but also their peers through the freely available mobile game.

Katherine added: “In its current form, while we can only physically complete so many workshops in a year and build so many games, the games themselves can of course be accessed worldwide by anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection, and as such have the power to impact on a lot of people’s lives.

“ We believe the next step would be to develop an online or downloadable toolkit and best practice guide, with pre-made game elements that can be easily adapted and customised, so that community groups, teachers and families  with absolutely no coding knowledge can build their own games to explore and examine whichever issue they choose. “

Kippie will join four other organisations in the Social Innovation Skills Programme.

Work West and Enterprise North West are delivering an intensive training and mentoring programme to equip the organisations with problem solving skills. The teams will then be brought together for a full day Social Innovators Mentoring session to refine and evaluate their ideas, and identify next steps.

Once the programme is completed, all teams can apply for a Social Innovation NI seed fund worth up to £15k  to enable them to transform their ideas into reality.

Click here to find out more about Social Innovation NI and the Social Innovation Skills programme.