Orangujam at the Social Innovation Festival
I’m pleased to announce that the Orangutan Game Jam – shortly ‘Orangujam’ – which occurred for two sessions starting on July 20th and again on July 27th at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University will be exhibited at the
Social Innovation Festival at the Jockey Club Innovation Tower starting this Friday.
For those unfamiliar with the term, our unique orangutan game jams build on a tradition of short span game development events that are a commonplace activity for beginner as well as senior game developers in the world today.
In this project, we took game jamming as a format for encouraging young students to innovate and challenge themselves in game design, teamwork, and core information technology skills. The project was a spin-off for Touch project, which aims to bring digital enrichment to orangutans and to study human and non-human play side by side.Hosted by PolyU School of Design, a team of volunteer teachers worked with students over the course of 3-day workshops in order to develop playable game prototypes. The students gained basic knowledge in game design as well as in understanding their target audience. Orangutan’s abilities, skills, and special interests were later turned into unique design solutions that emerged from a thorough understanding of the user.
Stemming from professional game design contexts, students engaged in brainstorming, pitching, role-based teamwork, and even agile software development methods. Guided and taught by professionals from different areas of game design and development including graphics, programming and sound, all teams successfully reached the game development goals set by the students themselves. During the jam, also PolyU game design students from MScMET program gave feedback to young designers based on their knowledge and experiences from the past year.In total, 30 participants ranging from ages 10-19 created seven different working-prototype touch-based digital games all with a distinct flavor to set them apart and give the orangutans different experiences with each. Thank you everyone for contributing to this project!The games developed by students during Orangujam will be tested and evaluated by two Bornean orangutans, Bento and Is, at the Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue Centre in North Sulawesi, Indonesia later this year.
I wish to thank the teachers Andrea Hasselager, Cord Krohn, Ayesha Amir and Richard Chui for all their hard work. I highly appreciate The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust funding towards the workshops and partnership with Masarang Hong Kong. Stencyl provided us with a great tool for game design and development – thank you! Finally, thanks goes to the project staff at the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation and collaborating school principals, teachers and parents in Hong Kong.I will keep you updated regarding the apes’ impressions about the games! Here’s a screen capture of each game:
Posted 25th September by Hanna
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