Here is the Teacher Pamphlet.
Here is the app. It is for iPad only.
Getting Green: Trash Traders Postmortem
Project Flower Power was a project in cooperation with the sustainability club of Steenrod Elementary, an elementary school in Wheeling, WV. The goal of the project was to create a game to help teach the students about recycling and living more sustainable lives. The team was composed of Kacey Eichen, the internal producer who dealt with scheduling, instructor interfacing, and team and project management, Chen Longyi , the programmer on the team that focused on implementing front-end functionality and UI, Xiong “Joe” Zhenhao, the programmer who focused on the networking and server functionality, Jibran Khan, a designer on the team, Mai Ao, the team’s sole artist, and Jacob Rosenbloom, the team’s other designer and external producer who interfaced with clients and playtesting partners. After fifteen weeks, we created a networked iPad game about sorting and recycling for 4-16 players, played across 4 iPads, that sat in the center of a lesson plan about how to be more sustainable in everyday life. The game has each iPad become a recycling center at which trash of that center’s specific type — paper, plastic, metal, or glass — can be turned into a processed material that can be used to help create green products for the city and lower pollution. The players can trade trash amongst themselves to ensure that the trash goes to the correct center to be processed. Additionally, players can trade their processed components to other centers, as the products able to be made are different for each center and often require multiple types of processed components to create.
There were hundreds of decisions that went into making our game, Trash Traders, into what we believe is a successful experience that can be used to spark discussion about sustainability. Placing the students into groups so that there could be multiple student per iPad was one of our best decisions. This meant that students could collaborate with each other on the same platform as well as with all the other students in the game. We witnessed the very presence of multiple students around one iPad lead to increased engagement, more conversations about waste, students helping one another play, and the creation of roles that allowed each student to feel like they were contributing to the overall success in their own way. We attempted to encourage communication between students by giving each center (each iPad) a different set of green products the city needed. While this was effective in getting students to talk to each other, much more interesting conversations happened when multiple students played per iPad. When each iPad had 2-4 students playing on it at the same time, they would ask each other for help with identifying trash, sometimes telling anecdotes about some items. They would also help each other learn how to play by discussing what to do with certain items of trash and how to do that in the game. Separating the iPads physically by giving each iPad its own table forced the students to need to move around to discuss what they needed (or shout, which the teacher generally discouraged) which gave rise to the role of Drivers, which were students that went between groups to ask for items that their recycling center needed to create its green products, which was a role students enjoyed since they knew that they were integral to success and they got to run around.
The teacher pamphlet we created was also a good choice. Creating a handout for the facilitator to use so that they could familiarize themselves with the experience, introduce, effectively facilitate, and lead conversation afterwards turned out to not only be a good tool to use the game as a springboard into more talks of sustainable practices, but also something that gave the teachers the confidence to facilitate the experience themselves, which they seemed quite excited to do. The pamphlet provided teachers with all the information they needed to know to setup and run the game as well as nudge students that are struggling in the right direction. The pamphlet also contained a wealth of information about sustainable practices and strategies on how to use the game as a springboard to talk about pollution and possible solutions the students can participate in. The information is broad enough that the teacher should be able to guide the conversation in multiple ways that feel natural, each with its own set of information, meaning they can have new discussions after each play. This also let us offload a lot of information that we were previously trying to get the mechanics to convey, which leads into another successful choice we made.
We followed the fun in our design process. Early on, during paper prototyping, we had one game that had the students shouting and laughing. It was an early version of Trash Traders, where students would divide into teams: paper, metal, plastic and glass. They would be handed a random set of trash and would need to sort it amongst themselves before the time was up or the pollution would rise. Because of the success of this prototype, we continued on in this direction of sorting under pressure to try and keep that sense of frenetic action. Some of the biggest challenges came when we shifted this idea from physical to digital as it was not terribly straightforward on how we could keep that frenzy. However, it is because of these origins and our dedication to follow what the kids enjoyed that we found the elements that worked, like putting students on teams, requiring collaboration, and putting time pressure on sorting. We struggled with finding what ways to do those best, but we knew that they were valuable elements to pursue, because the students had fun when they were part of the physical version.
Following the fun was also one of our biggest stumbling blocks, but for entirely different reasons. Our client asked for a game that would teach students about small, concrete actions they could do to be more sustainable in their everyday lives, and our game is a sorting game. We definitely missed the mark in getting that educational content into the game. We tried to add in ways of having this content, such as having the students getting points from creating goods that would lead to an event where they could vote on what new action they had people in the city doing to reduce their pollution. However, this mechanic broke engagement and we did not have enough time to iterate on it to find how it worked. Since it was not integral to the experience of the game we cut it. What was actually integral to the game was our core mechanic: sorting and trading, because that was the activity the students gravitated toward during paper prototypes. We were still able to hit our client’s desire by situating the game inside of a larger lesson and developing the teacher pamphlet, but if we had not jumped on the idea that we initially saw the strongest reaction to and instead used what we learned from that to develop some new concepts where sustainable practices could be the core mechanic, we may not have found a game that was just as fun but met the client’s needs outright.
Another issue we ran into was players not understanding how to play. In many of our playtests, we witnessed that students often lost the first game just because they did not know how to play. After floundering for an entire game, they often picked it up because the facilitator could nudge them into understanding, but the experience frustrated many and would prevent some from even trying again. We began to construct tutorials, but none of them were terribly effective. Even our final tutorial, an interactive tutorial that takes players through the entire game loop once, left some confused. The biggest point of confusion, curiously enough, was also one of the largest sources of fun in the game: talking. Many times, even after the tutorial, players did not understand that they needed to communicate with other centers to get the materials to complete their needs. This was usually remedied by the teacher assigning the driver role, the person that went between teams to ask for items for their center, and then later nudging the student to go talk to other teams if they still failed to. This makes sense however, since our tutorial is entirely single player, and players can complete the entire tutorial without talking to another player. Had the tutorial required the players to trade a processed item amongst themselves, the students might have understood this concept from the start of the game.
These difficulties were useful to our team as learning moments however. We learned that a game can be strengthened by being something that exists outside of the screen. Especially for children that enjoy socializing with each other, borrowing from the social aspects of board games and requiring the players to talk in the real world in order to win the game was something that was very satisfying. While they may have enjoyed the main mechanic, we saw most of the smiles and laughter occur when the students were talking to one another about what items were, asking for processed materials, and even purposefully doing sub-optimal things such as knowingly giving someone the wrong type of trash for a lark. We think it is these moments that cemented the enjoyment of this game in the students and what caused them to keep wanting to play. There is so much power in a video game that exists beyond the screen.
Additionally, we learned to lean into what we see. The first time we tested the full digital game with our client, we split the students up into teams and put each team at a different table with their own iPad. We had hoped that this would force teams to communicate, but we were not entirely sure how the students would go about that. Would they shout across tables, would they walk around with their iPad, or would they all just move to one table and talk? When we saw that the students began to split themselves up into roles and assigned some of their team members to go to other tables to ask for what they needed, we decided that it was great and codified it, creating formal roles from what we observed. Formalizing these roles in the rules allowed the students easier access to getting into the core of the gameplay experience instead of splitting their attention between playing and devising how best to play. Additionally, it gives the teachers a shared language with the students that they can use to modify the experience as they see fit. If a teacher believes that a student is hogging the iPad, they can tell the student to become a “driver” and without more than that, the student is forced to give up their monopoly on the screen and experience the game differently.
During that first playtest of the full digital experience, we split the students up into groups as a purely logistic concern. We only had four iPads and there were ten students. We had intended that the experience be for four people, one per iPad, but what we observed fundamentally changed the way we saw our game. After hearing all the conversations the students were having with each other about trash as well as the teachers being able to have smaller discussions with teams without fully distracting the entire team from a time sensitive game told us that groups on iPads was the correct direction for our game, which we now believe is one of its strongest elements.
We hope that this game gets used at schools, as it is to be release on the app store for iPad and all of the external resources facilitators need will be free to access. There is quite a bit of interest in showing this game off to different schools and organizations, and we would love to see it get used and help educators. However, if this does not come to pass, the Flower Power team has learned a great deal that we will be able to take with us to all of our future projects, both at the ETC and professionally.