Embedded Files
Pollinator Protectors:
Overview
Overview
For my fall semester Design Studio I course, I developed a library lending kit with two other students in my cohort. We designed our materials for families with children between the ages of 8-11 in mind. We created a story-book to help learners get excited about pollination and pollinators and a game that challenges them to design a pollinator pathway collaboratively. Other materials provide resources that allow them to be successful at the game and to continue exploring this topic more deeply. Our intention was that engagement with our materials would support interactions that spark curiosity in and appreciation for pollination and local pollinators.
Our Challenge
Our Challenge
Our task was to design a repeatable learning experience related to a personally meaningful issue of sustainability. We chose to focus on the decline in native pollinator populations. We focused on elementary school-aged learners in our design because we recognized that establishing an early awareness was critical. Informal education settings were an appropriate context for this population and topic because we felt that families and the home served as useful environments for discussions about pollinators. Moreover, we wanted this kit to be freely available for anyone in the community, so a library was our ideal access point.
Our Design
Our Design
Design Goals
Design Goals
Through our design, we wanted to...
Design activities that would establish an "island of expertise" from which learners could develop a baseline understanding of the topic that they could grow over time.
Prepare learners for future learning by providing them with the necessary baseline knowledge and experiences that they can activate as needed.
Learning Objectives
Learning Objectives
After engaging with our kit, learners will...
Leverage protecting pollinators as a means to enter the landscape of sustainability activism.
Care about the natural world, feel more connected to it, and reconsider the impacts of their actions.
Continue their exploration of the topic as it comes up in their real lives.
Our Design
Our Design
For our final design, we created a library kit with a range of resources and activities. Each component is described in more detail below.
An anchor text for the library lending kit activities. This short picture book introduces learners to the idea of pollination and the importance of pollinators. The main character, Buzzy, is a young resident of the town of Bloomsburg. She notices that the pollinators in town are dwindling and devises a plan to help protect them by bringing together people across the community.
A board game that brings pollinator protection to life. In this game, learners are challenged to create pollinator pathways through the town of Bloomsburg. Each time they play, learners encounter different affordances and obstacles. This linked folder includes the town lot tile covers, decks of cards, and a season tracker.
Connecting the picture book, board game, and real-life content knowledge. The Field Guide details the real-world plants and pollinators featured in the game and how actions that protect/harm pollinators are reflected in the game mechanics.
Our Design Process
Our Design Process
Design Conjectures & Conjecture Map
Design Conjectures & Conjecture Map
We created the conjectures below as a starting point in designing a set of repeatable experiences that would lead to our intended learning outcomes.
Learning Conjecture
Learning Conjecture
How I expect to achieve my learning objectives
By reading the book and field guide, playing the game, and completing the journal, learners will be exposed to the necessary information to develop domain knowledge about native plants and pollinators, providing an entry point upon which they can generate solutions to issues facing these populations in real life.
Engagement Conjecture
Engagement Conjecture
How I expect to invite and sustain participation
By inviting learners to engage with an array of materials that share a cohesive narrative, learners will leverage their personal connections to develop epistemological knowledge about pollinators and native plants, inspiring their motivation to work toward these shared goals in their own communities.
Equity Conjecture
Equity Conjecture
How I expect to contribute to a better future
By empowering learners to embody authentic roles within the imagined Bloomsburg community, learners’ decisions impact the health of pollinators and native plants, enabling them to develop strategies for taking meaningful actions in their own community to support the health of pollinators and native plants.
Conjecture Map
Conjecture Map
Research
Research
To get started, we conducted research in three major areas: content, learners, and existing designs. We then incorporated approaches from the existing literature as lenses to guide our design process.
Content
Content
What should we know about native plants and pollinators in order to develop our design?
We reviewed the literature and spoke to ecology and entomology experts that understood our local area (i.e., Greater Boston). We learned that 1/3 of all foods comes from pollination due to honeybees. We also learned that flowers rely on vectors to move pollen, and this finding led us to focus on demonstrating how pollinator corridors are created and maintained in our design.
Learners
Learners
What do we need to know about our learners in order to develop our design?
We spoke with parents and educators to become familiar with our target learners’ potential interests and needs, with the hopes of leveraging these to support their interactions with our design. We learned that one way for kids to change their attitudes toward the natural world is to engage their “heads, hearts, and hands.” This finding led us to include a range of activities in our design.
Existing Designs
Existing Designs
How can others’ work inform ours?
We reviewed activities, programs, and materials from a variety of sources. We paid special attention to what we believed worked in their design and what would need to be changed for our learners, venue, and other design constraints. Once we landed on centering our kit on a board game, we then played a number of board games, particularly cooperative board games, per our instructor’s recommendation. We found cooperative board games align well with our idea of creating an activity where learners represent people in a town working together.
Theoretical Lenses
Theoretical Lenses
In addition to conducting our own research, we also incorporated ideas from the learning sciences into our design:
Transformational play
Transformational play posits that games can establish worlds where learners take on authentic roles that require applying disciplinary practices and content to achieve a desired end.
How we used this lens: We created roles in our board game and many characters in the book to provide learners with meaningful positions to embody, foster personal connections to our materials, and develop a sense of responsibility for acquiring disciplinary content to accomplish desired ends.
Distributed cognition
Distributed cognition refers to the collective learning that happens when participants interact with each other and with tools in the context of an activity.
How we used this lens: We designed our game’s larger “mission” to be optimally achieved when the distribution of each player’s prior knowledge, personal perspective, in-game role, and actions for each turn is leveraged. This learning theory also guided our decision to make the game cooperative; no single player has the full set of skills needed to win and instead must utilize each others' strengths effectively.
Preparation for future learning & islands of expertise
"Preparation for future learning" occurs when learners are supported in taking in new information and/or applying existing information in a new context. Islands of expertise refers to the topics that people are naturally interested in, that they read books about, watch videos about, and share with others, and through this repeated exposure, they gradually develop a deep and rich knowledge of these topics.
How we used these lenses: We designed our kit as a constellation of activities. The set of activities encourages discussion, sparks individual curiosity, and supports continued engagement with native plants and pollinators.
Our Iterations
Our Iterations
We started this design project thinking we were only going to create a board game and iterated over a series of play testing sessions. By the second and third iteration, we had a sense of what game mechanics were needed. We also quickly realized that the game alone was not sufficient to support learners in reaching our intended learning goals. By the third and fourth iterations, we had a sense of what supplementary materials would support game play and continued learning.
FIRST ITERATION
FIRST ITERATION
Design features: For our first iteration, we created a lo-fi cooperative board game, reusing pieces from a commercially available board game and from an alumnae of our program's board game. We created some simple game assets that allowed us to play through our game premise: townspeople (players) working together to support annual pollinators' migration.
Testing: We tested this version among ourselves (the design team).
What we wanted to learn:
Is a collaborative game was the right format to reach our learning goals?
What game mechanics work well given our learning objectives?
What we learned:
A cooperative game provided a good foundation for the type of cross-player cooperation we wanted. We had to collaborate with each other to achieve success in the game, much like how we wanted our learners to see that people in their communities must unite their efforts to protect pollinators.
As for game mechanics, we noticed the biggest issues were the tile shape and instructions. The rectangular tiles decreased the potential paths players could move across the board, making winning harder. Additionally, the instructions were missing important gameplay details and were didn't provide enough context to motivate deeper learning. An introductory premise might offer an authentic problem to be solve through game play.
SECOND ITERATION
SECOND ITERATION
Design features: In this version, we created entirely bespoke game pieces related to protecting pollinators in a suburban town. We also typed the instructions and included a one-page storyline that situated the players within the game play setting.
Testing: This version was tested with our learning engineering cohort.
What we wanted to learn:
What were players confused about when playing the game?
What did players learn and became curious about during/after game play?
What we learned:
Players asked questions about the game mechanics that didn't accurately represent the real-world. For instance, flowers couldn't be planted on most lots and the either/or logic of "inhabitable" and "uninhabitable" lots was confusing. We realized that these mechanics needed to be adjusted to more accurately depict the human and natural factors that affect pollinators' thriving
Players connected with their roles and learned that they had strengths and resources to offer the group. They also learned to collaborate when it came to how each player's turn went. We recognized that the introductory storyline really resonated with players and thought that expanding it into a short picture book to read before game play might promote learning.
THIRD ITERATION
THIRD ITERATION
Design features: We refined our game assets to make game play simpler and to more accurately relate to our topic. We also expanded the introduction into a short story that became the first version of Buzzy's Big Discovery. This story brought Bloomsburg alive, contextualized the main game challenge and introduced the reader to townspeople that they could play in the game.
Testing: This version was tested with our learning engineering cohort again.
What we wanted to learn: Did the changes we made lead to...
Better buy-in to the game premise?
More accurate understandings of pollination?
What we learned:
The book served as an anchoring narrative that established clearer links between the story elements, game components, and real-life analogs.
The game mechanics better represented real-world interactions between human, animals, and plants. However, learners' primary focus was on the actions they could take to protect pollinators, not with the plant and pollinators species themselves. We realized we needed to draw more attention to the plants and animals and their importance.
Unexpectedly, game setup was a barrier due to the instruction manual creating confusion. We realized we needed to continue simplifying the manual and incorporate more scaffolds that made it easier to get the game going.
FOURTH ITERATION
FOURTH ITERATION
Design features: This version included all previous elements but with revisions to increase visual appeal. We also simplified the manual, adding more images and icons to reduce the amount of text. We also created a "Field Guide" that built upon and made connections between the real-world concepts that appear in both the storybook and game.
Testing: This version was tested with a group of 8 fifth graders from the Brookline area.
What we wanted to learn: How did our materials...
Support learners from the intended age group in engaging with each other and the content?
Foster accurate understandings about pollinators for learners from the intended age group?
What we learned:
The game was easier to set up and players were able to get started with minimal adult support, much like how fifth graders expect to play board games amongst themselves.
Players' conversations revealed they were grappling with the topics as intended. It seemed like the repetition and consistency across materials made game play easier and emphasized learning goals.
However, the players imagined that their younger siblings would like the book but wouldn't be able to play the game. Their comments made us aware that there was inconsistency in the developmental appropriateness of our materials. To make all the materials work for the same age-group, we could consider adjusting game play to be more appropriate for younger children OR the storybook to be more appropriate for older children. We were not able to address this issue in our final design but would if we had more time.
My Critique
My Critique
Overall Strength: Offering Invitations
Overall Strength: Offering Invitations
Our design offers a variety of invitations for learners to engage with ideas related to pollinators. The range of activities we created are intended to foster curiosity about the interactions between pollinators and people. In testing our design, we were able to see how our game, book, and other materials sparked productive conversations about pollinators. We are also hopeful that these experiences can be activated and further developed in the future when learners encounter pollinators in the real-world.
Future Improvements: Addressing Variations Among Learners
Future Improvements: Addressing Variations Among Learners
In the future, we would like to address expected variations among our learners in the next iteration of our design, particularly differences across learner ages. The 10- and 11-year-olds who gave us feedback on our fourth iteration shared that they would have engaged better with the story if it were written for a more advanced reading level. However, they were able to engage with the game independently and enjoyed playing. It seems like there may be some discrepancy in the intended age group for each component of our kit, as we expected the same child to be able to engage with all the components. Going forward, I would like to conduct more testing with younger children, as I am curious how they might relate to the story and the degree to which they are able to understand the game mechanics.
My Insights
My Insights
Designing for learners and learning requires testing with the intended learner population.
Young learners had fun when the learning experience became immersive, included appealing physical manipulatives, and was tied together with a cohesive narrative.
Cooperative games enabled meaningful collaboration as individual players worked together to reach the collective goal.
Scaffolding needs to be embedded at all phases of an activity.
Scaffolds need to be included in transitioning from one activity to another, setting up an activity, and the activity itself.
Within an activity, interactions between learners can also be supported with explicit scaffolds. Such scaffolds allowed us to better leverage cross-player discussions during game play.
Providing diverse and varied activities can cultivate engagement with a topic over time.
Our progression of activities helped learners process and retain information.
The variety of interactions our design provided served as entry points for different types of learners.
Utilizing design-based research methods effectively guides the design process.
The design process helped us gradually position learners in an authentic situation in which they could achieve the intended learning goals.
Conjecture maps are helpful tools for refining design, identifying if and whether our design meets our intended goals, and identifying which components to adjust and then test to see if our revised design is better able to reach these goals at each iteration.
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