25th May saw the last of our L&T funded TDC Sustainable Living Challenge workshops, with three groups of Game design/Development students and their Course Director, Peter Gordon, from the Games, Media, Art & Design Department at Basingstoke College of Technology successfully winning awards as follows:

• Prize for best working collaboration – Group 2
• Prize for most Innovative Concept – Group 1
• Prize for best completed prototype – Group 3

Two of our 3rd year students were in attendance as our Student Ambassadors, Lucy Hopkins (BSc CAD) and James Palmer (BSc Digital Media Development – 3D Environments (Game & Heritage)), helping the student groups through the design thinking process and working on their  own entry for the challenge.

The winning groups and their projects were:

Group 1 – Eco Trumps: A set of trump cards that provided information about modes of transport and the eco value of each one. A couple of designs for the Eco Trump cards were created and then laser cut using wood.

Group 2 – Casey: A depth sensor and app that informs people how full their bin is and once it reaches ‘nearly full/full’ the sensor will alert the Council to take a ‘community bin’ to the area for using. This is to stop bins overflowing and leaving waste on the ground, or prevent fly-tipping when the bin is too full.

Group 3 – Cardi Go: An AR application that encouraged people to get fit/increase heart rate and therefore a healthy heart. This was by being chased in AR by a threatening ‘something’ such as a Zombie or similar to make you run away from it (based on Pokemon Go, but being chased rather than finding Pokemon)

Our Digital Media lecturers Kerry Steele-Jones, Sam Barker and Marina Brkljac assisted with the design thinking process, with Sam providing demonstrations in AR (Cardi Go project), laser cutting (Eco Trumps) and coding depth sensors (Casey project) and Kerry providing a session with the VR Headsets.

The students were taken through the Design Thinking Process to come up with a solution to a problem regarding Sustainable Living, specifically to do with Sustainable Development Goal 11. One of the group would be a member of the public and the others would discuss/ask questions about a problem they had with regards their day to day life that fitted with SDG11. Once the issue was determined, the students then went through the ‘define and ideate’ process to come up with a number of solutions.

After the first set of two workshops, the students had realised a solution they were happy to take to the prototype stage:

The second set of workshops were then used to refine their ideas, and create the prototypes:

The workshops were considered good fun, engaged the students by team collaboration, creating prototypes and by being shown the various processes throughout the workshops that were new to them, and of course the Pizza lunches. The students were also shown around the West Downs Campus by Marina during one lunchbreak, and then King Alfred’s Campus at the end of the last workshop.

Hopefully we will see them again for our ‘Game Jam’ in Fresher’s Week, and further Game Jams through the semester.

Many thanks to everyone onvolved for making this such as success.