We had to create educational games for children of Khoj Community School, age 4-7 years and organise a bal mela. We had 4 days to prepare for it. We came up with three games. We weaved these 3 games into an adventure story. The child was the hero overcoming 3 challenges.
Save the Frogs:-
Literacy Domain : ( Number Bond )
The dragon had stolen all the water from the lake and locked it up in pots. Paper cups were arranged in a pyramid to represent that. Children had to knock the pyramid to release water. They had to count how many cups were knocked and then they had to make the origami paper frogs jump to the corresponding number bond to get to the water.
2)Monster Game:-
Literacy Domain - Sorting and Counting
In the second adventure, a monster had locked lots of mice in a room with a window. This was represented by a shoebox with a hole and decorated like a monster. The box was filled with different coloured and size balls. The child had to wear the box like a backpack with the help of strings attached to the box and jump. The balls would fall out of it and another child had to collect, count and sort the balls according to size and colour.
3)Maze Game :-
Literacy Domain - Phonetic Game of identifying the picture and making the word.
In this adventure, the child had to get out of a maze. They rolled a big dice and took as many steps on the maze. There was a picture on each step. With the help of letter tiles they had to then spell the word to escape.
Save the Frog game -
Objective :- To make number bonds fun for children. We added a story element to make it interesting.
Design Elements :-
We selected a small ball for the children to aim.
We added a dragon cut out to add the story element.
We used paper cups pyramid as the target so that it is easy for children to knock it out.
We made 2 lines at different distances with masking tape on the ground to mark a point from where the children could aim to suit all age groups and ability.
Challenges:-
1)We had attached a MakeyMakey kit to the numbers so that when the frog jumps on it the circuit is completed and a “croaking” sound comes to make it more attractive. In the physical design I had attached one wire to a coin with the help of Blu Tac and the other end of the wire was connected to MakeyMakey. The coins were arranged with respective numbers. The Blu Tac was sometimes interfering with the connection between the wire and the coin. Thus the sound was coming inconsistently. This was a design flaw.
2)It was a windy day and the event was outdoors. The paper cup pyramid was falling with a gust of wind. Then we stacked 2 paper cups together and used 20 paper cups to make a sturdier pyramid.
Maze Game :-
Literacy Domain - Phonetic Game of identifying the picture and making the word.
The objective of the game was getting into fun into literacy and blending it with phonics along with having an element of fine motor and gross motor skill.
Here are the steps of how did we designed the maze game
Drew a big picture of a maze on a large sheet of paper with different pictures of three-letter words at different path