Whale Protection Corps.
Game Design, UX, Content Writing, Graphic Design
Our team collaborated with our client to create comprehensive computational thinking for students in Grades 3-5. We developed an engaging game that enables children to run numerous simulations, aiming to mitigate the hazards associated with shipping activities and their impact on whales. Throughout the lesson, students were introduced to a wide range of tools currently utilized in the field and were encouraged to evaluate the effects on both whale populations and the shipping industry in order to arrive at an optimal solution.
Design
This was a fast-paced project where the art and design needed to be done in parallel, and interactive prototypes needed to have finished design and layout.
Background Logic
The challenge was to find a way to use whale location and ship data to calculate the chance (percentage) of a whale collision. I did this by converting high and low traffic areas to a 1-5 numeric value, then multiplying the two to generate a percentage, then normalized.
Leveraging QGIS data
This was a data-driven project involving ship and whale locations, where I learned to use QGIS software in order to manipulate the data into an age-appropriate game.
Game Play
Players are presented with a gridded map where they mark tiles as "slow zone", "no-go zone", and then adjust a scale for "invest in whale reporting". These 3 variables decrease the chance of a whale collision. However, the trade-off is the impact to shipping if a player places tiles too close to ports. Players must decide and find a happy balance between the two. Once the player inputs their selections, they can run the simulation to see the results.
