 My name is Julia Trujillo, and like you, I also come from different countries. I am tasked by the city. My role in the city and what I need to do is to make your transition into Portland easier. What can we do to help you? Okay? As people that come from other countries. I came from another country. What we're doing today here is Portland of Opportunity. Portland of Opportunity is a virtual environment, a video game that was designed by the city of Portland's Office of Economic Opportunity and the engagement lab at Emerson College in Boston. That that you did will help us with informing those decisions. The video game also, I hope, others have said that the most useful part of the game is that you learn of places in Portland that can help you that you did not know about. The video game initially was designed in order to learn from the population that the office was supposed to serve. What are their most persistent challenges? What are the resources they're aware of that already exist? What are their gaps that are there and we could be doing something greater about? Usually when we call the general public to come to City Hall, it's usually a pretty narrow set of people who come and provide feedback. So I was hoping to create something that was engaging, was fun, taking advantage of the language of video games that is generally universal. I always say, if half the world is addicted to Candy Crush Saga, why can't we use the power of that medium and the virtual environment in order to really engage in a more meaningful way than just a very transactional conversation. The game was designed for a single player experience, meaning that anybody on their own can play it. But we find when we've rolled it out both in Boston and in Portland that it's a more meaningful experience when you play as a group, especially if you play in pairs because you can learn from each other and just becomes a very rich conversation. So we decided instead of having people come to City Hall, why don't we come where we find the people that we're supposed to serve and Portland Adult Education is the biggest hub in the city. So we decided to do it here. So it's asking you, what is most important to you? You have three choices. Learn English, get a job and meet people. The last spring I attended a meeting and I learned about how the city was collaborating with Emerson College on designing a video game to inform our new mainers about resources in the Portland area. When I saw Julia this fall and she said she might want to do some more trials within the classrooms, I volunteered my two classes. So we did it last night and this morning. After the game we give every player a card like this. So they usually like to play the game a second time once they're familiar with the mechanics of it. So it is pretty common with people to play it again on their own after the fact and we're hoping to improve the game that maybe at the end of the game they're able to get a list of the resources they visited. So there's a lot of things that we're thinking about on how to improve it. The goal of the game is to get 100 points. Last night my students were pleasantly surprised to learn that they can go home and do this because it's a web-based game and it's very new now and they've just done it once and maybe they didn't have great success in getting to the end of the game but now they know they can go home and continue playing it. To access a game is available online just through a basic URL which is portland.opportunitygame.org. It's frustrating as a new manor to try to navigate city resources on your own and maybe you don't know who to turn to so it's a good simulation. The game asks basic questions like what is most important to you and according to that the character visits different ports in the city. We also at the beginning of the game we ask the participants to rate themselves and how they feel at home, what their sense of belonging is here in the city and how aware resources they are so we test them before the game and then we test them after playing the game to get a real sense if the game has been effective. I'm actually learning myself so last night was my first look at it and today I'm more familiar with it and I actually think it's great because the more doors you can unlock the more resources are available for you and I think the students are going to learn about things that they never even thought like one of them just learned about 2-1-1 a free phone service where you can have a lot of information at your fingertips so just having them learn about that to make their lives easier I think is great.