Zoos have been popular with young visitors helping to educate children in animal conservation. Yet, zoos’ typical strategies use interactive signs and videos, which children typically ignore. In pursuit of new learning methods, Stuart Gray and myself developed a game for children design technology for zoos. We call this game ZooDesign, suitable for children of age range 8-11.
You can read more about the paper published in ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference here: https://doi.org/10.1145/3459990.3460697.
How to Play ZooDesign
ZooDesign consists of Animal and Enrichment cards and an Ideation Sheet. You will also need pencils, crayons or colouring pencils, lego and animal figures. You can use the card sets that we have developed or edit these for local animals. The Enrichment cards are areas that seek to enhance the quality of animals in captive care. Enrichment cards are across five key areas: food, environment, sensory, social and cognitive.
Children pick at random an Animal card and an Enrichment card. Children then use the Ideation Sheets to draw out a technology for the animal and enrichment. This stage lasts approximately 5-15 mins. Children can use the information on the cards to find out how to support the animals enrichment. For example, the Lion animal card has information on their socialness. If there is time, the game should be played many times. After this, the educator can then interview the children about their designs. When we ran this workshop we pretended to be from the local news station seeking new ideas for the zoo.
Examples of children drawings: Left a lion eating while using a telephone to call lion friends (Dietary and Lion cards), and Right, an elephant using a translator app to speak to other species (Elephant and Social cards)
An important part of this process is that it is self directed. The children can choose to work together, talk to each other, ignore the game or do as they wish. This child-centered process allows the learner to explore at their own pace.
We have found that children often imagine technological and non-tech solutions. The drawings often tell stories of how children envision animals, and themselves. While not all the designs are appropriate for usage with animals, this game supports children to think about what animals in different ways. Especially about what animals would want and need.
If you do use this at your school, education event or with your children, please let me know. I would love to see your drawings!
Thank-you to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) in supporting my fellowship to enable me to run such events and participate in outreach.
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas 