The Hundred for Parents
The Hundred is not a traditional learning platform. It is a game. You beat it by wielding the sword of knowledge. You level up like your heroes and dragons. And you achieve this by amassing thousands of pieces of real-world knowledge. Every game feature is carefully selected to make you a great player.
Content
The Hundred will offer choices for parents and carers to choose and tailor the content of the game.
The standard version will be free to play and offer 1,200 pieces of foundational knowledge covering a wide range of topics. School subjects like science, maths, history, geography, literature, language and grammar will be covered. There will also be an offer of basic knowledge that goes beyond standard typical school content: health, nutrition, physical exercise, finance, political systems, psychology, philosophy, and many more.
Subscribers to The Hundred will receive free access to content relevant to their child’s school syllabus, supplement material and additional functionality.
The scintilla AI
The Hundred is a learning platform that combines dozens of elements to turn learning and retaining new knowledge into an enjoyable and healthy experience. It uses the well-tested scintilla AI that makes learning 3x faster and prolongs retention by factors of 20 and above.
It achieves this by adapting to the learner. It does not matter whether a player already knows some of the answers. It does not matter whether they are fast or slow learners. The Hundred does not reward knowing things, it rewards getting to know things. It incentivises healthy learning habits. It paces the player and gives learning a rhythm that makes it easy for the mind to absorb.
The Game
At scintilla.ai, we believe that the optimal way to deliver a learning platform is via a game. We believe that once we break the orthodoxy that games are for play once you have done your work, we can produce a tool that boosts learning, multiplies retention and deepens understanding.
A successful learning platform has to provide a collection of elements. It has to be a sandbox, where new knowledge can be tried out safely. It has to foster long-term engagement so that skills can be refined and practised. It has to offer optional competitive elements. It has to create identity and community. It has to provide pacing and rhythm.
The Hundred is not a gamification. Gamifications are only one first step on a 100-mile journey. The Hundred fully reconciles learning and gameplay.
Loving the game and learning thousands of new things are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. The following sections detail how The Hundred achieves this by carefully offering game features that are designed to boost results by making the experience enjoyable.
In the beginning
The game sets the scene: You inherit an old factory from your granddad in a remote village. Your granddad did not make much money, but he used to be a local hero who has helped the villagers for many years. You find an old handwritten notebook and it turns out that your granddad kept a secret: He bred dragons! You learn that breeding a dragon can be difficult and often takes a long time. But once you succeed, having dragons is much better than having all the gold in the world.
Setting the scene is often overlooked in learning platforms. However, buy-in and ownership are imperative on your first day of a learning experience. Don’t enter for your parents or teachers, do it for yourself!
For this, you need an identity. If you want to become a great swimmer, you have to view yourself as a swimmer. This way, you can evaluate everything you do: Does it support or hinder your swimming? The same applies to learning. The Hundred gives you an identity that will develop over time. It gives you a role model. It gives you dragons as a metaphor for your progress. It is upfront and honest that it will take time and practice, and it emphasizes that what you are about to start has immense value.
Breeding Dragons
You are given your first dragon egg. It is for a common dragon, easy to breed and quick to bring up. All you have to do is forage for some rocks and wood to fix up the dragon hatchery and nursery. Don’t forget to collect some fruit on your way so that you can feed your dragon once it hatches.
Metaphors and symbolism play a profound role in shaping human experience. They are powerful mechanisms to encourage long-term engagement in the face of difficulty. Religious symbolism is full of metaphors to create a rhythm that connects individuals to their faith, their community, and their heritage (Christmas trees, The Menorah, The Crescent Moon and Star, Lights at Diwali).
The Hundred introduces dragons as a metaphor for progress towards mastery. They need care and time to grow. They need practice and recovery. Over time, they will symbolise growth, milestones and closure. The first steps into the metaphor are easy and result in a quick reward, but even those first steps require a little bit of grind.
Exploring
By foraging the lands around you, you will find all the common resources you need to build up your base and to keep your dragons going. Some of the day to day items are abundent and some are harder to get, and occasionally you will find rare items you can use to improve your factory or special food for your dragons.
Exploration is another metaphor The Hundred works with. Exploration first and foremost encourages and paces engagement. Just like in real life, players often need to grind for resources they need (in video games referring to the act of repeating an action or set of actions) and sometimes they are rewarded with surprises: If you find some rare molybdenum ore you can harden your steel helmet and make it more temperature resistant. You can beat bigger beasts now (especially those who breathe fire) and you have a great motivator to grind for more molybdenum to harden your full armour set.
There is no real-world learning in these early stages. It will become part of the game grind and will give access to epic and legendary resources. At this point, The Hundred is still setting the scene and works hard to achieve full buy-in.
Your first Battle
It does not take long, and you have your first dragon! Now you are able to hunt for the beasts that roam the lands around your base. They drop rare resources, but you can only beat the very low level ones yet. WIth a little bit of strategic positioning you can beat more difficult beasts. Your first loot will let you make your first armour.
The Hundred sets up up for a journey of self-improvement. There are multiple ways to become stronger: Simply levelling up and getting better gear is one way, strategic positioning is another. Later you will have whole teams to hunt, and most crucially, you will soon make your teams a lot stronger by answering quiz questions. But you haven’t unlocked quizzing yet - this is the next step.
Quests
Once you have hunted your first beast, you will get to know the villagers a bit better. They all have several issues to resolve and need your help in many situations. If you don’t have the knowledge or skills to help them immediately, you can go on quests to find out how to solve their problems. Help the magician travel to faraway countries. Help the farmer use a lever to lift a boulder. Help the blacksmith to find out about his great-great-great-uncle fighting at Waterloo. You will receive useful resources as a reward and unlock quizzing for your battles. You also receive hero shards!
Real-world knowledge is introduced to the game. The scintilla.ai is designed to find topics and areas where individual players benefit most. It meets every player where they are. There is no reward for existing knowledge or skills. The Hundred rewards progress, incentivises healthy learning habits, encourages practice, and leads players to mastery.
Now that you have finished your first quests, you can support heroes and dragons in battles by answering quiz questions. You enter the highly effective scintilla.ai revision approach: Knowledge sinks in 3x faster and if you play frequently, your retention is prolonged by a factor of 20 and above.
Summoning Heroes
You use your first hard-earned hero shards and you summon your first team of heroes. Each hero has different properties and needs gear and levelling up. The game has dozens of heroes and the options to combine and equip them are endless. Heroes (and dragons) have strengths and weaknesses and work well for some beasts but not for others.
The Hundred uses the gacha game concept that is popular in many MMORPGs and other games. It is addictive and is often used to incentivise players to spend real-world money. But money is not a currency in The Hundred. Knowledge is. Players spend real-world time on quests and real-world learning purchases the next pull in the hero hall. Who knows, you might summon the ice hero you so desperately need for your frost team this time!
Battle Strategy
You can take up to 5 heroes and 3 dragons into each battle. You will quickly find that heroes have different skills and that you can combine them strategically with dragons. You can also boost each hero by answering quiz questions: Is your healer overwhelmed and your heroes lose HP? Does your attacker struggle to set the final blow? Is your defender too weak to keep the others protected? Just answer a few rapid-fire questions and gain back the upper hand.
Timing revisions to increase the spacing effect are a core component of the scintilla AI. It has been tested with 10,000 users in 40 schools across the UK and achieves two effects: Retention is multiplied and forgetting is interrupted, but it also trains up effortless, fast and precise recall. It takes knowledge from just being familiar to making it second nature. After a short while, knowledge is just there at your fingertips, ready to use whenever you need it.
Quizzing
You soon find out that quizzing has a diminishing effect. Go into battle with knowledge you know very well and you will hardly make a dent. But unlock some new topics, learn the answers to questions you did not know yesterday and your impact is massive. Can’t quite beat a beast? How about going on a couple of quests to earn brand-new quiz questions?
The scintilla AI constantly monitors knowledge and builds up a statistical model of what a player knows and when they benefit from revisions. The Hundred uses this highly accurate model to spawn beasts at the right time: There will be a lot of beasts you can beat with physics questions when you are just about to forget the answers, but there won’t be any for geography if you know the answers like the back of your hand. This way the game will always ask challenging questions. Our data shows that everyone will get about 70% of the answers correct, no matter how experienced they are, how fast they learn, or how often they play. The game is never too hard and never too easy.
Train your dragons
You can level up dragons by taking them into battle and improve them with gear, but what really brings out the best in them is this: Dragons yearn for knowledge. Without it, they get stuck on certain levels and they won’t make any progress any more. But once you teach them what you have learned on your quests, they truly come to life. Teach them about the water cycle and they will launch water hose attacks, teach them where the world’s deserts are and they will scorch their opponents.
Progressing from passive knowledge to being able to actively externalise it is a huge milestone in the learning experience. The Hundred monitors when a player is ready to take this step. They have gone through quests, they have shown in quizzes that they have good familiarity with the content, and just at the time the player becomes able to explain a concept, there is a dragon who can’t wait to learn about it.
The Hundred will use generative AI to achieve this level of interaction and be able to combine multiple elements of externalisation. It will build up vocabulary and encourage structured thought. Good comprehension is rewarded and smart answers are more successful. As with everything else, The Hundred builds conversation skills gently. Where simple communication will be good enough for your first dragons, more advanced ones will need great vocabulary and concise explanations.
Guilds
After a while of solo play, The Hundred allows you to join guilds where players can coordinate their battles, support each other, trade resources, and compete. Guilds will compete with each other in mini-games and there will be events every three months for everyone to meet, celebrate progress and show achievements.
The scintilla AI optimises the spacing effect. Players will benefit from huge memory boosts that may last for many years. But this can only be achieved if they make learning a long-term habit. Guilds and comparable communication features are integral ingredients in most games that achieve long-term engagement.
The Hundred will provide the ability to share the experience with others and to find a community around a game. It will put all safety guards in place. Guilds will be restricted to players in the appropriate age bracket and communication will be limited and moderated. Video content will be created by hand-selected content creators to ensure quality standards.
The Hundred will create a high-quality enjoyable experience for everyone. We hope we will meet your child there. They will know thousands of facts in a few weeks of gameplay. And if they engage for a couple of years, this knowledge will last forever and forgetting will be a thing of the distant past.