Designing To Learn at Rathlin Festival
On a bright sunny Bank Holiday Monday, Dr Susann Power and I travelled over from Ballycastle across calm waters to Rathlin Island for the Rathlin Sound Maritime Festival.
In collaboration with the Rathlin Development and Community Association, Susi and I were there for the day to facilitate a game design activity with local island children to further test our Designed to Learn activity, while also testing out the new and improved Beach Clean 2.0 methodology (and kit) with a younger audience.
Game Designing To Learn
To kick our day off, we began with a short talk describing the activity, what the children could expect, and finally, we explained the different playable elements on the tables such as Topic Cards (based on environmental themes), the Extraordinaires (playable characters available on Creative Commons Licence), A3 sheets (their design pitch templates), Think cards (design prompts), and an assortment of drawing and creative material (post-it notes, felt-tips, pencils, etc). This interactive and hands-on workshop aimed to encourage children to use creativity while learning about environmental challenges such as marine and beach plastic waste, biodiversity and habitat loss and land pollution, all through the world of game designing.
Through the lens of imagination and the power of choice, children were introduced to several learning strategies, using creative principles such as idea generation, sketching and pitching their games that addressed important environmental concerns. The children dove into their game designs with enthusiasm and had fun choosing their Extraordinaires (whether a wizard, a mermaid, or a robot) to design their game for. These playable characters, created by Rory O’Connor from Hub Games, helped the children to visualise and design their environmental games based on a fantastical character.
The most popular environmental theme overall was Climate Change and Ocean Health. Given that the close proximity to the surrounding waters and that plastic pollution is an everyday occurrence for the island children, this made sense for this to be the most popular topic.
We had a great variety of games such as:
- Rescue Fairies – incorporated Rathlin animals needing to be rescued, such as helping to save a lost puffin or a seabird caught in plastic to win the game.
- Plastic Pirate – had multiple challenges for a player to go through and win by collecting as much plastic from Rathlin’s seas as possible.
- Mermaid Mania – a mermaid has to evade fishing boats, collect plastic bottles, before crossing the finish line to win the game.
- Wizard – you, as the player, have to take plastic items you find straight to the wizard in his castle who will then convert the rubbish into a plant. The first player to turn a field of rubbish into a forest wins!
After completing their designs, the children then “pitched” their final games to their peers, explaining their game rules, characters and how to win. This part of the session always elicits more questions that the children can ask each other and serves as a great way to encourage discussion about creativity, the impact of choice and to see if the children enjoyed this learning activity.
Beach Cleaning For Fun
To flow onto our next activity, we then took the children to Church Bay where we donned the updated Beach Clean 2.0 bag-holders, replete with colourful bags (yellow, blue and black) and fancy bung additions to keep the bags in place, along with litter-pickers to begin our beach clean. The bright summer sky shone gently upon us as we perused a section of the beach, closest to the Branson Centre, and as we picked fishing rope, plastic bottle caps and an assortment of beach litter, we asked the children to find what would be the “winning” pick of the day, as in, the most unusual find, or largest item, they could lay their litter-picks on! This activity passed by in the blink of an eye, as it always does when you’re focused on winning, and soon enough we all gathered to return our litter-picking items.
All in all, it was a packed morning full of activities and part of a fantastic lineup for the Maritime Festival programme. The day out to Rathlin served as a great way to introduce game-design learning to Rathlin island children while showing them the impact of the Beach Clean 2.0 project, with many more events like this to come in the future.