SDG Project and Design Thinking

Summary

Materials

• Days 3-6 PowerPoint deck
• COVID Simulation example No Social Distancing - (for teacher)
• COVID Simulation example With Social Distancing - (for teacher)
• SDG Project Template
• SDG website
• Explore SDG partnerships
• UN Food Donation Game
• MakeCode Arcade
• MakeCode Debugger how-to video

Instructional Activities and Classroom Assessments

1. Share COVID game simulations (20 mins)
2. Revisit SDG's and Design Thinking Process (10 mins)
3. Define the Problem (10 mins)
4. Empathy Building (10 mins)
5. Ideation (10 mins)
6. Prototyping – Get Feedback (20 mins)
7. Prototyping – Select an Idea and Build (multiple days)

Learning Objectives

• Students will craft a digital representation of their proposed solution using the platform of their choosing.
• Students are able to identify bugs and modify their code to solve them.

Details

1. Share COVID game Simulations (20 minutes)

• Take some time to have the students share the COVID social distancing simulation games they created
• Ask students to demonstrate their games and also talk through their code
  • Where did they have challenges?
  • What would they like to do, but perhaps didn’t get time for?

2. Revisit SDG's and Design Thinking Process (10 minutes)

• Our next few days are going to be invested in selecting a global or local problem to solve and following the Design Thinking process to build a game that will address the topic
• Keep the SDG website as a bookmark you can reference to explore more about each one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
• You can also explore what organizations and other partners are doing for specific SDG’s here
• The design thinking steps that we are going to practice throughout this project are:
  1. Discover – This involves problem definition and empathy building
  2. Ideation - Brainstorming solutions for your users
  3. Prototyping - Bringing one of your ideas to life through a MakeCode Arcade game
  4. Testing - Share your prototype with your others and gather feedback
• Have students fill out the SDG Project Template documenting each step of the Design Thinking Process for their Project

3. Define the Problem (10 minutes)

• Research the SDG’s
• Think about people you know, your community, yourself, things you’ve heard in the news – are there any particular issues that resonate with you?
• Consider formulating the problem definition like this:
  __ is a problem for _ because ____.

4. Empathy Building (10 minutes)

• Identify your target audience - who faces these problems?

  • Children
  • Elderly
  • Poor
  • Specific geographies/locations

• Research your Audience

  • Online
  • In-person

5. Ideation (10 minutes)

• Brainstorm at least 3, but ideally 5-10 different ideas for ways a Game could impact your chosen SDG or Problem area
  • Awareness – spreading the word
  • Education – teaching people
  • Simulation – recreating the environment/situation/problem
  • Encouraging Action – tie into real-world actions
  • Charity Donation – game purchases (i.e. Free Rice)

6. Prototyping – Get Feedback (20 minutes)

• Share your ideas with a neighbor or partner:
• Collect Feedback:
  • Fun/engaging game?
  • Ties to the SDG theme?
  • Feasible to implement?
  • Suggestions?

7. Prototyping – Select an Idea and Build (multiple days)

• Pick 1 idea to use for your game
• Plan your game first:
  • Characters
  • Dialog
  • Scenes
  • User input
  • Score/Lives
• Build it - MakeCode Arcade