Hexacago Health Academy’s Showcase: Final Board Games (Ashlyn Sparrow)
Our blog series for the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab’s summer workshop, the “Hexacago Health Academy,” continues with Ashlyn Sparrow who is the Lab Director of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.
On July 24th at 3pm, parents and The University of Chicago staff and members of the community visited Hexacago Health Academy’s Showcase. For the last three weeks, youth worked hard researching health topics and turning them into board games. The four resulting games are:
Chicago Clinics by Pyramidz
Players work as doctors attempting to treat or cure patients with different STIs by randomly drawing “patient” character cards. Each player, in turn, rolls a die to move his or her patients around the board. If the player lands on a specific STI space, they must answer a trivia question. For every correct answer, players keep their cards with STI information, representative of becoming a specialist in a certain disease. Players also accumulate tokens to be used at the clinic to treat patients. Incurable STIs require more tokens to provide the proper treatment. To provide treatments, or cures, each doctor must return to their home clinic. This team is focusing on providing basic health information to peers that play their game.
I Didn’t Do It by Rubics Cube
Each player has a set of 5 narrative cards. The first player to play all 5 of their cards, completing the narrative for their character, wins. Players can only play their card if they enact the scene that the narrative describes with the character pieces on the board, which represents the shared living space of the characters. Each narrative is different. For example take one of the cards that begins the story of Sabrina:
“Sabrina was fighting with her mom since she decided to go to a Christmas party instead of coming home. At the Christmas party Sabrina and Audrey got into a fight.“
To play these cards, the player must place Audrey and Sabrina at the correct locations on the board, as listed on the card.
“Three best friends of the house must get to Jennette’s house. Sabrina was pacing back in forth in the living room.” So you had to move Sabrina to the living room and the other characters outside her door.
I Didn’t Do It is trying to get its players to realize that you cannot tell by a person’s story whether or not they will become pregnant. Life style choices indicate a chance that you will get pregnant but anyone who has sex can get pregnant.
UFObesity by Countrixx
In this quirky game, players are trying to escape from a city overrun by aliens who are trying to eat them! Players attempt to reach their character’s weight loss goal while escaping the city. To do so, players must defeat aliens that guard gates preventing access to parts of the board. There are three aliens, representative of different obesity-related problems a person might face. They are: illnesses, fat shaming, and enabling friends. To break through these protected gates, players must complete trivia questions and gain support cards that will help defeat the aliens. The goal of this game is focused on escaping a cycle of childhood obesity and each player getting their weight down to a healthy level.
Moving Too Fast by Triangle x
Players take on the perspective of a teen, balancing extracurricular activities, social events, jobs, schoolwork, and even sexual activity. All players start by drawing a goal card such as becoming employee of the month or becoming prom queen. To meet these goals players draw one of three cards: study, work, and class. Study cards give players class credits, which will move them to the next grade level. Work cards allow the players to earn money. Social cards are the most unique, earning players extra credit to be shared with another player, popularity points, and potential relationships. Pregnancy is a risk, however, and may potentially slow the players down. Regardless of your player’s fate, the ultimate goal is to graduate with a high school diploma. This team is exploring how a teen would balance pregnancy, and attempting to show their peers that they can still go to college or accomplish their goals.
The showcase began in the Logan Center (915 E 60th St) room 901 from 3:00pm – 5:00pm.
All our students earned digital badges that linked them to learning pathways all across the city of Chicago under Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s initiative: the Chicago City of Learning . Through this site, youth can continue learning about design, coding and health with partnered organizations.
In the coming weeks, facilitators will debrief on the summer experience in order to improve the program for next year while our researchers will begin looking over interviews and surveys to test whether this program increased interest in STEM careers.
This year has been an excellent learning experience for youth and for us! Thank you all for following Hexacago Health Academy. Special thanks to Aramark for providing free lunches for our program!