Introduction
Hello dear Laurea’s students and professors! We are a student team from Laurea Hyvinkää Campus, and we are working on a Business Project for this Autumn Semester. Let me introduce you what our work is about.
Firstly, we are an International Team composed of five students. Two of us are exchange students, coming from France and Germany. The three other students are from Finland. Obviously, the language of the course is English, so that the exchange students can talk and write. We have one lecturer, Aapo Hollanti, who helps us and advise us in our work and for the smooth running of the project. We also have one client, Annemari Kuhmonen, who is a lecturer from Laurea Hyvinkää.
Our project topic is Green Finance. We need to create a game for some students aged from 16 to 18 years old. Thanks to this game, we need to teach them basic stuffs about Green Finance and Sustainable Development. Their high school is located right next door to our campus, it is called Hyvinkään Kipinä.
Through this blogpost, you guys will discover our project, and how does it work! Especially, you will learn more about more precisely the part of the student’s meeting and of our game. Have a nice reading time, we’ll hope you’ll enjoy it!
Student’s meetings
On purpose to create a great game and to know better the students, the Team organized a few meetings with them, in their own classrooms. To be precise, we met them three times, to which we must add one final meeting in which we will play the game with them.
We had about 30 students to talk to and to get to know during our meetings, who will be the same we are going to play our game with.
The first meeting took place in September. It lasted approximately 90 minutes. During this one, we firstly prepared some nice stuffs about us, and we turned it on into a game, in which they had to guess among three sentences with one was true about us. We started the meeting with this fun game so that they would know us better, and it would help to break the ice. Then, we asked them to write down in groups 3 “personas” of a Finnish student, who are basically the stereotype of a normal Finnish student. This helps us to know about their personalities and their way of thinking. We also played with them last spring’s Green Finance game on Seppo. Thanks to this information, we were able to understand they expectations and they desires about the games, and what kind of games they liked, and they wanted to play.
The second meeting took place in October. This meeting was a little bit shorter; its duration was about 1 hour. We began it with a Kahoot games, including a few fun and educational questions. We did this to make them feel more comfortable, and to test their knowledge about Green Finance, so that we could knew if they were good at it, and we could adapt our future game questions. Afterwards, Finnish students did a PowerPoint Presentation in Finnish about economics, and some financing concepts. They did it in their own language because some of these notions are difficult to understand, and it would be easier to teach to the students in Finnish.
The third and last “discovery” meeting took place in November. During it, we mainly played with them the games we created, so that we would be able to know if our games have imperfections that we could correct, and to know what game they didn’t like, and the one they thought that was the nicer one. In the part of the blogpost, you will know more about these games and about the choice they made.
Games
We had two main ideas of games. These two games were the ones we played with the students during last meeting. The first one was kind of a Trivial Pursuit game. The second one was kind of a classic board game.
An important to know about the games, that differentiate them a lot from regular games, is the fact that we added storytelling to our games, because the personas analyses showed that they liked it. Also, during our study time, we found out that it is a great way to learn, way easier than with regular teaching.
In the first game, players can start wherever they want on the board. Questions are divided into 3 categories: Ecology, Economics, Financing. For every good answer, the player receives the card he answered. There are also boxes called “Story”. If the player gets on this box, he will have to answer a question related to a story. If he’s good, he can choose the card he wants. The winner is the first to have 2 cards of each category, so 6 cards in total.
The second game’s rules were the following: Still the three category boxes, and the special story box. But unlike the previous game, a player doesn’t stop until he answers wrong a question. And he doesn’t get neither card if he answers good. They are around 40 boxes. The player can’t choose from where he starts, he needs to follow the direction of the game.
During the third meeting, we also asked them about three different story telling, to know which one was their favorite. We wrote a few sentences about each story, explaining the characters and the synopsis. Among these three, they liked more the one with the wizard master, so that’s the one we choose to add to our game. Thanks to this fantasy storytelling, we hope they will be more focus on the game, and that they will learn more of it, since we studied that storytelling is beneficial for these kinds of things.
Finally, we played both games with the students. They liked them both, but they preferred the Trivial Pursuit like game, because they really liked the board, and the game give them several opportunities to discuss on the questions. This is the one they chosen, and of course, it will be the one we will play with them soon. Let’s hope they will enjoy it a lot and they will get to know plenty of stuff regarding Green Finance!
Thanks for reading us, and don’t forget to invest greener, the Earth need you!
Suurin osa Showcasen blogeista on toteutettu osana Laurean opintojaksoja. Koko koulutustarjontaamme voi tutustua nettisivuillamme. Tarjoamme kymmenien tutkintoon johtavien koulutuksien lisäksi myös paljon täydennys- ja erikoistumiskoulutuksia sekä yksittäisiä opintojaksoja avoimen AMK:n kautta!