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.
Cool Ways to Recycle
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Roles
Lead UI Designer
Project Manager -
Tools
Photoshop
Illustrator
Unity -
Play the Game
Overview
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.
Brainstorming + Needfinding
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.
Minigame Prototyping
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.
Food Sorting Minigame Lo-fi Prototype
Originally, our team planned to develop a game for mobile devices so our first prototype reflected that.
Food Sorting Minigame Hi-fi Prototype
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.
Food Sorting Minigame Final UI Design
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.
Rinsing Recyclables Minigame Sketch
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.
Rinsing Recyclables Minigame Hi-fi Prototype
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.
Rinsing Recyclables Minigame Final UI Design
After another two week sprint, our team was able to complete our second minigame.
Release
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.
Achievements
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!