BMVR Co-Creation Program
July has been an incredibly eventful month for Brain Man VR. We completed a 12 week incubator program. We learned (nearly) everything there is to know about entrepreneurship - networking, pitching, financial models, business plan, Go-To-Market strategy, legal considerations, AI ethics and bootstrapping / investment. Most importantly of all: we launched our co-creation program.
We very much subscribe to Agile Development practices and, as a former Product Owner for Fundamental VR, it has always formed the basis of how we approach VR development. As soon as our Chief Technical Officer had created a basic game loop we were out there testing it with our end users, namely teenagers who will be taking GCSE maths in a couple of years time.
There are three avenues through which we reach our end users:
Home Visits: parents invite us into their homes and get their teens to invite a friend or two over to participate in game testing
School Visits: earlier this month we visited Latymer Upper School in west London and did user testing with a full class of 26 kids
Events in Central London: starting next month, we will be inviting parents to bring their teens to Digital Catapult’s amazing head office in King’s Cross (right opposite the British Library)
if you’d like to register your interest please click here
Digital Catapult offices are directly opposite the British Museum and just down the road from the beautiful St Pancras building
School Co-Creation Program
When we go into schools there are multiple benefits for the students. Not only do they get a crash course in how a Lean Start Up company progresses from Pre-Seed investment, through Seed, Series A and Series B, they also get a short careers talk from our CEO (who scanned brains with MRI to earn his doctorate in 2005, then went on to write books and present TV shows, finally getting a Master’s degree in VR in 2019, before founding Brain Man VR) and an explanation of how software development works. Each teen takes turn trying out the Brain Man VR game being tested at that time, provides immediate feedback after the session and then fills in a more detailed questionnaire. We use this feedback to steer the next three weeks of game development and as we return to schools every half term, the kids can actually see the impact of their feedback on the game when they test each successive iteration.
The school co-creation program has been so successful that we’ve been approached by City of London Girls and the International School of Paris, who are also interested in participating, and if you think your own school would be interested in participating too, then please do get in touch to sign up soon as spaces are very limited.
Our primary co-creation partner is Latymer Upper School in west London
Starting next term we will also be working with City of London School for Girls
If you’re wondering about the logo, they are based right next to the Eiffel Tower, which clearly influenced the design
