Angry Birds | Gaming for Education

Rovio Entertainment, the creators of the Angry Birds, are collaborating with A World At School to start a gaming tournament with the goal of raising an awareness of a petition for education. Participants will play the Angry Birds Friends game and support the hashtag #UpForSchool. Rovio points out that there are 58 million children around the world who are unable to attend school because of great issues that exist outside of the children themselves. Some of these problems include conflict, discrimination, and child labor. Angry Birds games have been downloaded over three billion times. Rovio wants to use this global audience to affect a positive change in the world by speaking out for children in need of formal learning.

The petition #UpForSchool has six million signatures on it thus far. The plan is to take this document to Oslo for the upcoming Education Summit. The originators of the campaign want to ensure children in conflict situation will be able to receive the necessary education. Gaming company, Rovio, has previously launched charitable campaigns aimed to rescue endangered birds, motivating children to read, and help earthquake victim in Nepal.

Another company in the gaming industry, Palringo created a charitable platform to target their gaming users who celebrate Ramadan. During Ramadan, alms giving is a good virtue and thus has garnered a positive result. This year Palringo is focused on world hunger. They will fundraise to contribute to food aid programs. The gaming company even integrated limited time charity fish into its chat-focused fishing game. Other companies such as Zynga and Playmob were also involved with charity through their gaming platforms. Playmob has a track record of charitable campaigns totaling up to thirty-five in just the past two years. Gaming platforms that were used to promote the causes included Sims Social, Plants Vs Zombies, and Madden. In that two year period, $1 million was raised for causes like Cybersmile and WWF.

To learn more about how the gaming industry fundraises, visit Forbes online here.