Goal

The overall goal of the project is to solve the current water challenges in Palestine and build a more sustainable society that values water and other environmental resources by using innovative and effective educational means to address and deliver environmental concepts and ideas that is:- A unique idea, doesn’t exists in the Arabic speaking market – Introduce behavioural based environmental education in primary schools in Palestine- Games are fun and addictive!

Why Water Heroes?

The current approaches to education in Palestine do not allow achieving national education targets. Kids do not have effective ways to become aware of environmental challenges and learn how to live more sustainably. Water Heroes consulted with many kids and their parents, who all felt that current school curricula are too intensive, but only provide content inputs and do not sufficiently focus on a format that facilitates real learning. Kids complained that they are bored during the classes and they want more interaction and different types of exercises, rather than lectures from teachers and learning from books. When school is over many of them, like to play computer games.

Therefore, Water Heroes developed a prototype for an interactive water education game, which kids can play on the computer or mobile phone. Tests with kids showed that they learn a lot about sustainable behavior and they have a lot of fun doing it. They get engaged in a hands-on learning process, which is attracting much higher attention than traditional printed material. Imagine if kids would come home asking their parents if they can PLEASE play Water Heroes, the waste management game or any other environmental educational game? This is how we can achieve the level of education and awareness needed in Palestine to achieve a more sustainable society. Water Heroes will offer ministries and educational programmes to apply the developed learning techniques to their teaching material and make many other key topics related to sustainability a fun game for our kids.

Up to date, we have tested the water heroes prototype with ten pupils with very positive results. On average the pupil evaluated the interest and relevance of the game with 23 out of 25 stars for five different parameters (the evaluation sheet attached). While these are very positive initial results, we do recognize that these short-term tests need to be extended to test the learning effects of the game over a more extended period of time. At this point, we are still at the prototype stage and will continue our research to increase the learning effects throughout the process of developing the full-fledged game. For this purpose we will continue to test different levels of the game with pupils and then ask questions to assess the learning level directly after playing the game and two weeks later. We will continue this research during the rollout of the game in the pilot schools in Jerusalem when pupil will be systematically exposed to the game over a period of four weeks.​

Lamis Qdemat is a social entrepreneur who founded Water Heroes. She has a Master degree in water and environmental studies from Al Quds University and is passionate about solving the current water challenges in Palestine, which is why she joined the Cewas Middle East Programme in July 2016. Throughout the start-up programme, she continuously developed and tested her idea to come up with a viable solution to advance environmental education and efficiency of awareness-raising campaigns. This is how she seeks to contribute to building a more sustainable society that values water and other environmental resources.

Water Heroes is a BuildPalestine campaign, BuildPalestine is a platform to connect supporters around the world with trusted projects in Palestine through crowdfunding campaigns and crowdsolving challenges.