**5. A digital tool based on multiple intelligences: Boogies Academy**

Boogies Academy is a library of video games designed to evaluate and improve multiple intelligences in primary education. It was created with the aim of giving families and education professionals a tool which was both attractive and motivating for students and easy to use in both educational and research and evaluation settings.

The design and development was done using a proprietary methodology called the tree of intelligences (TOI) method. This methodology has, at its roots, the fundamental Theory of Multiple Intelligences from Gardner [2, 29, 47] added to the design of educational video games. The result is an algorithm which allows the real‐time measurement of a player's achievement, providing information about their profile of intelligences, as well as advice for improving strong areas and compensating for weaker areas.

To make the information measurable, the Boogies Academy tool is constructed on two fundamental foundations: instructional design, that is, the planning, preparation and design of resources so that learning happens [48]; and the idea of intelligence as the ability needed to resolve problems or create products which are important in a specific cultural context or community [2].

The game mechanics, content and evaluation criteria were defined following instructional design, allowing data to be recovered and difficulty levels to be set. For video games to be catalysts capable of activating multiple intelligences, thought must be given to the content, skills and abilities they aim to develop, without forgetting the aesthetics, narratives and video game techniques which encourage engagement and guarantee playability [21–24]. To that end, once the instructional design was done, the game was given shape by illustrators and graphic designers before programming was completed by the technical team.

It should be noted that the game mechanics were designed with regard to the concept of intelligence being the ability needed to resolve problems or create worthwhile products [2], while bearing in mind that intelligences always work synergistically [2, 49], and that there are different ways of being intelligent within a single intelligence [49].

Each game presents the gamer with a problem to solve. Depending on the skills or abilities the challenge requires, one principal intelligence and one or more secondary intelligences are activated. In this manner, one problem may require speed of reaction (activating visual‐spatial and bodily kinaesthetic intelligences), whereas another may ask for knowledge of various animal species (activating naturalistic intelligence).

When creating the problems and defining the game mechanics, the designers considered the key abilities Gardner and his colleagues recognised in Project Spectrum [43–45], such as musical perception or sensitivity to rhythm in the case of musical intelligence.

To date, a total of 10 games have been designed and developed, covering at least one key ability [43–45] from each of the 8 intelligences recognised by the theory. The games are:


One of the strengths of the Boogies Academy tool is the real‐time result readout. This means that the tool is not limited to classification as it can also provide feedback to help the player address their skills and abilities by, for example, offering a learning itinerary of suggested games that will use the player's stronger skills and abilities to work on their weaker points. According to Gardner [2], psychologists spend too much time classifying individuals and not enough time trying to help them. Hopefully, thanks to Boogies Academy, education professionals, as well as parents, will be able to identify a student's strong points in addition to the weaker areas in their capability profile, and use this information to, among other things, guide the search for educational experiences that best fit the student's profile and will bring about development and strengthening of their different intelligences and abilities, as well as guide their future study or work in subsequent stages of education [2, 49].
