Alice Pavaloiu, the creative co-founder of #DECODE is the type of person who cannot breathe without creativity, nor without working on an impact project. Her professional journey has been contoured mostly by her desire to bring an improvement to people’s lives.
After bringing her contribution into the world of AI ethics, she had moved on to a project to lower the crime and corruption rates across culture by helping people reinforce their foundational pillars of integrity.
One super-power she is proud of having developed is training people to fight their inner demons, which she did successfully through her coaching practice around the world. However, while being involved in these social, high-impact initiatives, one thing that stood out throughout her professional path was the power of education and how much of a game-changer it becomes in people’s lives, regardless of what format it comes in.
“Learning is becoming decentralized and that is one of the best things that can happen to education. I am not discrediting traditional education by any means, since it definitely has a tremendous, societal impact, but learning can happen in so many other ways – it could be by sharing information with a friend, through a youtube video or a TED Talk, through online courses on Coursera, Skillshare or through an app or mobile game. Having access to information so easily encourages us to use our critical thinking and creativity, especially since we no longer need to store (memorise) information, but learn how to index it instead.
A very interesting phenomenon that is taking place is that we are learning more about the learning itself in order to save us volumes of not-so-relevant knowledge converted to priceless drops of time (or years of our life). This fast-food need for condensed knowledge may be prized by some people and condemned by others. Nonetheless, it raises a very important question related to whether a language can be learnt by using these secret nuggets of knowledge or if the vocabulary part would always be comprised by needing to absorb substantial volumes of words.
#DECODE was created when I met Adam, the game’s co-founder, who had started sharing with me his methodology of combining these two different ways in order to speed up the language acquisition, while still maintaining a constant rate of retention. His life-work showed me new ways of understanding English and be able to learn it thoroughly, correctly and effectively in a shorter amount of time without needing to bend backwards because of the metaphorical weight of the vocabulary to be learnt. Needless to say, I wish I encountered such an educational tool when I first learnt English or any language for that matter.
I remember how I learnt English and surprisingly enough, it was through video games. Later on, we started studying English at school, which was also effective, but not fun. As a result, I felt persuaded to give Adam a helping hand and create together a mobile game which would only enhance the rate of language acquisition by being fun and engaging. Having an interesting storyline would only motivate the user to go through the game faster in order for the story to unfold given the well-written script and beautiful design of the game.
I remember how glued I was to the screen whenever I would play a game. I would go to incredible lengths of imagination only to find out what a word meant, when information was not so easily accessible back in the no internet dinosaur era I was born in. Fortunately, #Decode enhances the process of English learning through a different methodology and a refined palette of tools and gives joy to the user by playing the mobile game, just like I used to have while playing. “