Final Post

Irene McLaughlin-Alves and Sam Scher
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Process

Sam Scher and Irene McLaughlin-Alves

The theme for this studio was the Syria crisis. Specifically, we were connected with the Karam Foundation and they wanted educational games for the kid refugees to use in Reyhanli, a town on the southern border of Turkey. We decided to create a game made to help kids learn Turkish. This is important because Turkey does have programs for the refugees to be able to go to college, but they must be able to speak Turkish to do so. We made a more physical game that was modeled after the idea of a carnival game. We took the idea of throwing something and knocking over an object that would then provide information for the person playing. We decided that two people (or teams) would stand on either side of the game. Each card would have a Turkish word on one side, and the Arabic meaning on the other. On the bottom of each card would be an image to confirm the vocab word when hit. One player would speak a chosen word by one player on one language's side, and their partner (or team) on the other side would throw a small bean bag at the word they think matches in the opposite language. Once knocked over, a slide would go down to reveal the confirmation image. Our cards have dry erase surfaces so they can always be new words and personalized by the kids and teachers. We planned to also make a pre-made set of cards to go with the game so the game could be played without having to write out the cards by the players. These would be able to switch in and out of the card frames build onto each row. We spray painted the frames outside so the structure was more colorful and created a point system where a certain number of points are assigned to each frame hit. This was for the competition aspect of the game. We ran into problems with measurements along the way but worked them out as they came. Our product did not end up completely finished. We didn't get a chance to build in the sliders correctly in each frame and we never tested out actually throwing something at the cards.