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The Story of La Programa de Letras

One balmy day in September 2024, 15 student teachers and their professor arrived at ArteSumapaz for what could loosely be termed “an excursion.”

I had organised the excursion about five weeks earlier with Profesora Claudia Patricia Carvajal (pictured below) from Escuela Normal Superior de San Bernardo. As their truck wound its way up the driveway, I waited for them, gnawing my fingernails.

My nails were being thoroughly gnawed because I had spent the previous three months researching, designing, collaborating, and labouring over a roaming scavenger game called La Programa de Letras. The game’s grand prize was a hidden treasure chest.

Professor Claudia and her 15 students were to be the game’s first (and, to this date, only) players. I’d only tested the game once before and knew it would be bumpy.

Their mission was to find six wooden cubes hidden around Artesumapaz. They had to complete the exercises written inside each one to learn the “Letras,” then put them in the correct order to reveal the location of the treasure chest.

Fourteen months have passed since then. I’m back in Australia, working at a Melbourne high school as an English and Visual Arts teacher through Teach For Australia. I’ve reflected a lot on La Programa de Letras and how it unfolded.

In this blog post, I’ll describe the project’s original intentions, explain how the game worked, and reflect on how well my ambitions aligned with reality.

Intentions

The core intention of the project was to create a pedagogical tool that could help students feel more connected to their environment by learning both in and through it.

La Programa de Letras was conceived while I was working at a primary school in Kingston, Tasmania. I was a teacher’s assistant working closely with students with learning difficulties or more intensive behavioural needs, a role I’d previously held for three years at a specialist high school in Sydney, working with similar students.

I witnessed many students struggle within traditional classrooms. They struggled with discipline, boredom, and alienation.

I dreamt of an alternative system where students could exercise choice and agency, and learn outdoors through genuine curiosity and desire. La Programa de Letras (let’s call it Letras for short) attempted to bring that dream to life by embedding a curriculum inside a game.

The curriculum focused on the ecology of Artesumapaz. It explored different networks of life: the movement of leafcutter ants, the fall of Yarumo leaves, and even the electrical infrastructure of the house and its surroundings.

While this version of the game is inextricably linked to the ecology of Cundinamarca, I always imagined that its overall format could be adapted to almost any ecological context on Earth. One day, I hope to recreate it with students here in Australia.

Still, I put myself in the strange position of “teaching” Colombian students about their own environment as a very non-Colombian person who speaks Spanish like a muddled six-year-old.

While I was fortunate that several Colombian artists and friends were happy to help me (s/o Yavi, Edwin, Maria, Prof. Claudia, Peppa, Camilo, Javier. ¡Gracias a todos!), much of what I learned about Colombian plants, birds, and geography came from the internet rather than through conversations with local people.

If I were to run the project again, my greatest priority would be to invite local people and elders to share their knowledge, creating a curriculum that represented their voices rather than my own.

Mechanics

The aim of Letras was for players to learn the curriculum organically through play. Working in small groups, they consulted the Mapa Exterior and decided who would search each zone.

Somewhere along a path in every zone hung a Letrabox: a wooden cube suspended from a hook. Players had to retrieve it, unfold it, and study what was inside.

Burned and painted onto the interior panels were:

• A bilingual bio-poem in Spanish and English about the Letrabox’s subject (an ant species, tree, bird, or the Sacred Rock)
• Diagrams depicting the subject in action
• An eje (short for ejercicio) for students to complete in their Ex Book (exercise book), a small handheld booklet

After successfully completing the eje in their Ex Book, I would verify their work and give them a sticker containing part of a secret code.

Ambition vs. Reality

In many respects, it was an unmitigated disaster.

After rushing to finish the game, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of the excursion to complete the final preparations. In my disorganisation, though, I forgot one crucial feature: the code stickers. Without them, the students had no way of unlocking each section of the code and therefore no way of actually playing the game.

I realised my mistake in real time, just as we reached the point in the demo level where I’d planned to hand out the first stickers.

In very choppy Spanish, I explained the rules: search the landscape for the six wooden cubes, complete the exercise inside each one, and return for your sticker before continuing the search.

As I spoke, I felt a crushing sense of disappointment. I’d brought these students all this way only to waste their time. An unplayable game is no longer a game.

But as they split into groups and ran off to inspect lichen, search for clues, and listen to electromagnetic energy, I noticed something unexpected.

Confusion certainly existed, but so did excitement.

The students were simply thrilled to be running around, exploring, and playing. Laughter and squeals of joy echoed through the landscape.

As part of my studies, I’ve learned about educational psychology and cognitive science. Through these lenses, learning requires changes to long-term memory. Memory is the residue of thought, and to think deeply about something, we first have to pay attention to it.

Despite the game itself being a train wreck, I’m optimistic that the overall experience was novel and meaningful for the players. I hope it was as memorable and joyful for them as it remains for me, and that it sparks conversations about what education could look like in the future.

Thank you to Ric and Peppa for welcoming me back.

And RIP, Jolene. Always in our hearts.

And…

Thank you for reading. 😊

Oscar