Since 2024, the association Développer l’Empathie par le Jeu des Trois Figures (DEPJ3F, “Developing Empathy through the Game of Three Figures”) has been supported by Make.org Foundation, a neutral and independent organisation whose mission is to “involve citizens and mobilise all of civil society to transform society in a positive way”.
The mission of the DEPJ3F association is to train childhood professionals in the Jeu des Trois Figures (Game of Three Figures), a scheme for preventing violence and bullying, from nursery school to secondary school, proposed in 2007 by the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron.
As part of the fight against bullying at school, Make.org Foundation supports three-year programmes to take concrete action on this social issue.
It is with this goal that Make.org enables DEPJ3F to train, free of charge or at a reduced cost, teachers and professionals in several education authorities (académies) to become facilitators and then trainers of the Game of Three Figures. Our project is for the national education system to have its own resources to roll out on a large scale this scheme, which is approved by the Ministry of National Education and recommended by the government as part of the prevention of violence and bullying in schools. Let us remember that the effectiveness of the Game of Three Figures has been shown by two action-research studies, in 2007-2008 (in nursery classes in the Paris region) and in 2017-2018 (in primary classes in the PACA region).
Thanks to the support of Make.org Foundation, in the 2024-25 school year we were able to deliver training in 12 académies (Aix-Marseille, Amiens, Besançon, Corse, Lyon, Nantes, Normandie, Paris, Poitiers, Rennes, Strasbourg, Toulouse). This resulted in:
- 256 certified J3F facilitators
- 19 certified J3F trainers
- Nearly 14,000 child beneficiaries
In year 2 (2025-26), the programme reaches:
- 11 académies: Aix-Marseille, Corse, Grenoble, Limoges, Nantes, Nice, Orléans-Tours, Paris, Poitiers, Rennes, Toulouse
- 385 professionals in J3F facilitator training
- 79 professionals in J3F trainer training
- More than 10,000 children, from nursery school to secondary school
This does not include all the professionals trained over almost 20 years, a number of whom continue their practice. Our monitoring tool, set up two years ago, has allowed us to go back partially in time to find people trained at a time when we were not concerned with tracking figures. Our application lists 1,200 facilitators of the Game of Three Figures and 140 certified trainers. In the almost 20 years we have been developing the J3F, we estimate that 100,000 children have benefited from it.
In this connection, if you ever took a J3F training course and are not registered on our app, we urge you to send us a short message via the contact form on the site.
While training in the Game of Three Figures is demanding for the professionals who commit to it, we are helped by a rapid roll-out model. Indeed, we provide “action-training”: people train as facilitators while running the J3F with pupils, and future trainers train while training their National Education colleagues.
Like all prevention schemes, the Game of Three Figures works over the long term: the practice, involving all the pupils in a class without discrimination, takes place weekly for at least one school year. We know what this means for teachers, on the one hand because of the pressure to cover the curriculum, and on the other in terms of practical organisation. But it is over this long period that deep and lasting change can be achieved. A few activity sequences centred on empathy and psychosocial skills during the year have never been enough to transform the dynamics of a class group. The Game of Three Figures can, as the action-research studies carried out have shown, and as feedback from the field shows us every day.
We warmly thank Make.org Foundation for supporting us in this project, and we thank all the professionals who agree to commit to this demanding… but fascinating! approach.
