Tech startup creates State Dept.-approved educational games for Middle East

The U.S. State Department has contracted a small Virginia-based startup to create mobile phone games to help citizens of nations the U.S. has poor relations with -- mostly in the Middle East -- learn about America and its values.

The strategy is to use the mobile phone -- which even poor families own in countries such as Iran and Iraq -- as a portal to learn about quintessential American trivia: our presidents, our history, and the laws that rule our land.

The hope is to tone down the anti-American rhetoric by engaging people with a fun game, educate them with American facts, and connect everyone in indirect dialogue through the mobile format.

ZDNet sister site SmartPlanet reports:

I asked Manouchehri if it was really fair to expect an Iranian to know who Patrick Henry was.

“The hope is that they’ll look them up,” he said.

Manouchehri said the choice of the mobile phone was only natural thanks to its ubiquity, which includes less-developed countries. Even in a poor household, a family might share a common mobile phone for family use, he said.

The hope, Manouchehri says, is to form “spontaneous communities” of people having fun and learning about America, connected around the world via a cellular network.

In other words, think a U.S. History-themed "Math Blaster" for a Nokia phone.

The move is an interesting "new media" approach to public diplomacy -- a way of taking the true pulse of citizens of nations where freedom of speech is limited or banned entirely. Take Iran, for example, whose citizens turned to social media when opposition to Ahmadinejad's election was squashed.

Is it fair for the State Department to be dabbling with the mobile phones of other nations' citizens -- if only for educational purposes? Leave your thoughts in TalkBack.