Cool Ways to Recycle is a web game that was designed and developed by a team of over 20 UCSD students over the course of 10 weeks. It aims to teach elementary students how to recycle by intuitively turning the task into a 6 level game wherein students must learn how to recycle in order to save all the animals.
I managed a subteam team of 7 designers and helped them become familar with the tools we used to illustrate and animate. In addition to management, I also helped design 2 minigames and the interface of the game.
Our early team meetings were spent brainstorming and needfinding. A few of us went to a nearby elementary school to see how students were currently being taught how to recycle.
We decided as a team on an overall 6 minigame model inspired by the popular "Dumb Ways to Die" mobile game, seeing how it did a good job of being fun while still getting a message across. The quick paced minigame model seemed to also be a hit with children as it kept their attention. We also liked how a wrong move would result in them "losing". We learn best by making mistakes, after all.
Originally, our team planned to develop a game for mobile devices so our first prototype reflected that.
Our team later decided to develop for web browsers so I redid our prototype's high fidelity version. Our original concept of sorting a cafeteria tray of food into recycling bins stayed the same however.
After the end of a two week sprint, our first minigame was finished! It was a complete implementation of our hi-fi prototype with animations and graphics created with Photoshop.
The original concept for the rinsing recyclables minigame was sketched out by our main project manager below. It isn't common knowledge that some containers and bottles need to be washed before being thrown into their receptive recycling bins so we thought that having one minigame promote that would be essential.
From the sketch, I was able to create a high fidelity prototype of the rinsing recylables minigame. It features a cute cat character, my first real attempt at animating an illustration.
After another two week sprint, our team was able to complete our second minigame.
At the end of 10 weeks, our 20+ team released Cool Ways to Recycle to the public and we were able to share it with elementary schools in our district.
Cool Ways to Recycle was well received. The UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering did a press release on our game and we got to showcase at the Design Forward convention during SD Startup Week 2016 as well!
