Mysterious Incident of Mr. Ferguson

Overview
Summer camps are ideal for preparing teenagers for teamwork and fostering excitement for learning. The camp activity engages students through hands-on experiences, collaborative work, and friendly competition, enhancing their nature exploration.

Goal
To create a flexible species identification game system for various camps and parks, inspiring a love for learning and teamwork among young participants.

My Role
Solo personal project

Skills
Service Design, User Interview, User Testing, Research, Product Design

Tools
Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and Procreate

Duration
5 months

Intro

A camp activity for collaborative learning post-world isolation.

Campers role-play as detectives to work as a team and follow clues to find a missing owl.

Discover

I started by looking to improve social anxiety in teens post-online learning.

I wanted to create an activity that would help with teenage bonding; especially after a long time of social distancing.

Discover

Through talking to teachers, I found a more specific problem…

Summer camp teachers found it hard to keep students engaged at their field trip to their local National Wildlife Refuge.

“One of our main activities is going to a local National Wildlife Refuge, but my students weren’t very interested in the guided tours.”
— Helen, Summer Camp Teacher

User Research

I sent out surveys and interviewed 3 teachers to find what kind of activities interests students.

Below are some questions I asked and quotes from the research.

  • What kind of activities and classroom systems do teenagers enjoy doing?

  • How do teachers keep their students engaged?

“We bring students out to forests for field research, and they really enjoy spotting owls since they are not commonly seen in the city.”
— Middle School Teacher
“My students enjoy group work where they can talk and work together.”
— Summer Camp Teacher
“Our camp divides the students up into groups and they can earn points for their group if they answer questions during lessons.”
— Summer Camp Teacher

Goal

How might we develop an engaging summer camp activity that inspires learning and teamwork among teenagers?

Development

Students enjoy being outdoors so I focused on inspiring exploration, collaboration, and a little bit of friendly competition.

The goal is to encourage a love for learning and teamwork among camp students, therefore I made unique roles for each student so they are included in every step of the activity.

Journey Map

A blueprint of users interacting with the kit.

Stakeholders - Teachers and students.
Scenario - Field trip to their local National Wildlife Refuge after the student’s guided tour.

Click to zoom in

Final Design

An immersive role-playing outdoor species identification game about one missing owl and the players’ goal is to piece together clues they gathered from the witnesses.

Demonstration

Here is how the game goes…

01

The teachers and students arrive at the location and are divided into teams of four students each.
Each team must have a Journalist, Navigator, Lookout, and Photographer.

02

Students are then given three identification cards from the Suspect Profile deck.
Students get a clue for each animal, bug, or plant they find.

03

Once the students identify the species on their cards, they must go to the teacher for confirmation to receive the clues.

04

Once the students identify the species on their cards, they must go to the teacher for confirmation to receive the clues.

Reflection🪞

During the testing phase, the navigator had trouble holding all her tools. If I had a chance to work on this project more, I would give the navigator just the map.

As this was my first service design project, I wanted to make sure the user research was done correctly. I ended up spending way too much time planning and doing as many user interviews as I could. Although the insights were helpful. I believe qualitative research would have been more helpful for this project.

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