It is with great pleasure that we, Team Joule, present you with the JurassicPower™ Innovation Center, our labor of love from over the course of the last fifteen weeks. At the beginning of the semester, the teachers of Elizabeth Forward Middle School charged us with creating a capstone experience for the Energy Lab, which at our second meeting evolved into a game about energy conservation that makes conservation real to students and empowers them to make changes at home today. They also tasked us with making energy tangible–something that proved to be one of the core challenges of our semester.
What resulted was something unexpected and novel: a multi-week educational experience that uses conversations prompted by–but not controlled by–our software to create real situations and real learning moments amongst students. From our very first playtest, students amazed us by reading into details we had just added on a whim, identifying themselves as college roommates based on the word “school” buried in a description or deciding that they did indeed need a large refrigerator because all of the housemates were going to cook a lot to save money. We opened the door to a role-playing experience without even realizing it, and we stumbled upon something more powerful than what we could have ever imagined.
Once we realized this power, we understood that our role as experience designers was to lay the groundwork for meaningful conversations by providing interesting situations and usable, comparable data, and then step back. For instance, the game has no timer by design–different teams need different amounts of time to discuss different things, and it’s only to our benefit to let that happen.
At this point, our design process is over, and it’s time for the true magic to begin. Through our playtests with the teachers, we’ve seen that they bring another layer of life to our experience, making teaching moments out of features we worried about confusing students, and using the experience themselves in ways we dream that students will use it in the near future. The conversations they bring as educators are insightful, well-informed, and exactly what this experience needs to be able to adapt to the learning style of the diverse group of students who will be playing. We can’t wait to see what they’ll do with this new tool.
We’re humbled to be working in service of perhaps the most important client of all: the students who are the future of this region and this country. We can only hope that this experience will transform the lives of hundreds of students in a small but meaningful way, and make them wise and empowered stewards of the world we will lay on their shoulders in the years to come.
-Team Joule