Design
Before proceeding with the design of the final scenario, I sketched my primary ideas and then I designed the first board game prototype and evaluate it by focus group in order to gather children opinion. The goal was to understand if the design idea could actually work or not. I tried to design a new rule to classic board games, such as The Game of Life, Monopoly and Chinese Checkers, because children can understand the rule of the new game easily base on their previous experience.
Based on the basic ideas I evaluate them from fun, educational, cooperative perspective, after that I modeled and prototyped the first version of the game board with the theme of combating gender stereotypes.
Game structure:
- Played by 2-4 individuals
- The player will win this game by being the first player as soon as he/she arrive the destination on the board.
- On your turn, the first thing you always do rolls these dice. The number that comes up on the dice corresponds to a tile on the board.
- Once you’ve rolled the dice on your turn, you have the opportunity to get four different cards. These cards will allow you to answer some questions that related to gender stereotypes as well as move faster than other players.
Doing Focus Groups with Children:
In the focus group part, I ask 4 children age of 4-6 to play game prototype and collect their opinion about the game, after that I will consider their opinion in designing a game. Game Parts that according to children opinion need correlation were:
- Board background design - The difficulty of the Game
- Symbol graphics - Empathy
Overall, the board game (Version 1) testing was successful, because children began to learn what gender stereotypes and how should they deal with gender bias in school through the question card. There was a great synergy during the entire testing. All the players were feeling excited to share their story, ideas and experiences in their lives. Before my game test, I also introduced the main purpose of my game to the art class teacher. The art teacher was also very excited about it. She expressed the wish that similar teaching resources could be used to teach children about different gender topics in the future instead of textbooks. At the same time, she also gave me some suggestions on my design.
However, I also found some problems in the testing process and children’s feedbacks:
1. At the beginning of the game, children may did not fully understand the game topic, such as what gender stereotypes are, so some them felt confused to the questions when they got the question cards
2. The rules of the game cannot be understood by all the children due to the difficulty and completely.
3. The grouping of games is random, some 4-year-old children will play with 6-year-old children. It is difficult for the game to proceed smoothly because 4-year-old children understand the rules more slowly than 6-year-old children.
The discussion of gender stereotypes in the game makes me rethink about the aim of my design. As Kalmpourtzis (2018) said, "Educational Games that work well were usually designed with the needs of the audience as the main driving force of the design." My design need to present worlds, characters and circumstances that player are familiar with, can understand and empathize with. Therefore, after collecting the feedback, I redesigned the structure of the game and adjusted the difficulty of the game.
Iteration
In this section, I put great emphasis on the introduction of gender stereotypes in the game. And I also focus on how to design an intrinsically motivating experience and building experiences that captivate player’s attention.
According to the structure of the storytelling workshop, I realized that storytelling can cooperate with the interactive games as a teaching method applying in the Gender Equality Education. This type of education method is similar to the TPR method. TPR is the abbreviation of Total Physical Response, also known as whole-body Response teaching method. Generally speaking, parents speak English and children act. Under this teaching model, children will use different interactive activities to understand a particular story or topic.
In terms of the storytelling part, I need to select a typical story book that can reflect the phenomena of gender stereotypes and gender bias. Then I found an interesting story called: William's Doll, which written Charlotte Zolotow. This story is the one of the first children's texts to address nontraditional gender stereotypes. The story follows William, a young boy who wishes for a doll to care for. William's father is unhappy with his request, instead giving William toys that he considers to be more gender appropriate. Finally, William's grandmother fulfills the William's request, explaining to William's father that the doll will allow for William to practice good parenting.
The book often is used in the classroom for lessons on gender roles, intolerance, or general anti bias education. To counterbalance inherent micro-inequalities in the classroom, William's Doll is employed as a method through which educators expose students to the concept of sex-stereotyping.
Apart from the story telling part of the game, other toolkits also need to be used help children to build empathy with the anti-bias story. Story Puzzle can be an interesting way to let children be the storytellers, with this game that lets children create their own fairy tale. Ideas that I came up with for using Story Box include: 1.Children play with the pieces and create their own stories and scenarios.
2. Each player in a small group is given several puzzle pieces. When it is the player’s turn, they can choose a relevant piece and tell their part of the story. This would be a fun activity to develop storytelling / speaking skills.
3. Children can write out and illustrate the stories that they have created for a class book or a classroom wall display.
Combating Gender Stereotypes Workshop
After reading few books about how to design a board game and after doing brainstormings, I decided to divide the Gender Equality workshop into three main stages:
1. Storytelling
2. Artwork activity
3. Story puzzle activity
Storytelling
The story-telling’s purpose is to help participants to what are gender stereotypes and what's the harm in stereotypes? Before the workshop, I re-illustrate the content of the story and design 10 question cards. During this section, parents or teachers need to read the story William’s Doll to the children and use the question cards to discuss gender stereotypes with children. For instance: Question: Do you have your favorite doll? Do you think both boys and girls can have a doll?
The second section of the game allows children to use the toolkits which in the box to design a character without gender stereotypes, such as a boy wearing a dress. I designed various kinds of stickers that help children to design a character. There are several ways to organize these stickers to create a character.
Story-creating
Then children will need to use the story puzzle and their characters to recreate a new anti-gender stereotype story, this section will encourage children to think for themselves, have their own ideas and express them. Adults can help them by giving some story example. The characters I designed in the puzzle are two female characters. Anne likes playing football and is curious about the world. Mimi dreams of becoming an adventurer. She wants to travel the world to learn about plants. They are not the "normal" girls defined by society, but they are trying to pursue their dreams
William's Box official website
In order to make this teaching resource freely available to more people, I designed a website to introduces the concept of gender equality, such as what gender stereotypes are and explain what we should do about them.
People can learn a lot of educational information related to gender equality on this website. Moreover, they can also print the kits for free.
Testing
Regarding the usability test of the final design, players had also different ways of interacting with the story and the game tools. Some children could at times do nothing but repeat the cue they selected. The majority of participants showed an innate ability to use their fantasy to build onto the story. Some would even put elements of their own life into the character and story, displaying a desire to form real-world, empathetic connections to the story.
When I read William's doll stories, especially when William was laughed at by his friends, the children showed great empathy. They put themselves into the story and felt the sadness that William was not understood by his friends. When I got to the end of the story, which is the plot of William and Bear travel together to find his lost doll, the children showed great joy.
In the end of the workshop, I explain the main idea of the story and also told the children that toy should not be gendered and we all need to respect other individuals who are different from us, no matter what kind of toys they like, what kind of clothes they wear, or what kind of hobbies they have.
