Long before recent partnerships, the MGM Research Group launched an educational app about Indonesian culture built with guidance from Japan's Mirai Education.
In May 2016, the MGM Research Group launched Jagoan Indonesia, an educational app for children built around Indonesian provinces, landmarks, and traditional culture, from the MGM room at FILKOM. It is one of the older entries in Lab MGM's history of outside collaboration, and it points to a relationship with a Japanese educational technology company called Mirai Education.
FILKOM described Jagoan Indonesia explicitly as a pilot project produced through cooperation between FILKOM and Mirai Education, with development carried out under Mirai's guidance. Mirai Education's apps were, at the time, popular in Japan and ranked among the top titles in the education category of the Apple App Store, which is part of why FILKOM sought the company out as a production partner for its own first attempt at a culture focused learning app.
Herman Tolle, a senior figure in the MGM Research Group, described himself around this period as director of the Mirai Indonesia Education Project, which suggests the relationship extended beyond this one app into a broader, ongoing effort branded under the Mirai Indonesia name. The available record does not give a full picture of how large or how long running that broader project was, so this page treats Jagoan Indonesia as the clearest, best documented product of the relationship rather than assuming everything the Mirai Indonesia name covered.
A decade on, Jagoan Indonesia is a historical rather than an active partnership. It is included here because it shows that Lab MGM's interest in working with outside companies on educational technology did not start with the more recent visits and agreements described elsewhere in Lab MGM's partner history. It started, at least in part, with a children's app about Indonesia built alongside a Japanese studio in 2016.
FILKOM's own account does not describe the Mirai relationship continuing as a formal, ongoing partnership past this period. What the app does establish is a working method that shows up again in Lab MGM's later international contacts, learning production or research practices from a more experienced outside partner on a specific, bounded project, rather than entering into an open ended cooperation from the start.
