Inspiration
Our inspiration for this project was to make information on systemic social issues palatable for young people through an accessible and easy-to-understand board game. Learning about these issues by 'living in others' shoes' will motivate teenagers and young adults to create change for the future.
What it does
In the board game, players have random character identities composed of race, gender, and socio-economic status. The players have to move through the board game and will stop at six life checkpoints (college, job, healthcare, housing, jail, and court). All players stop at the checkpoints and can only move past them if they roll a certain number on the die. Depending on the character trait, the “acceptable” die numbers vary. For example, for the job checkpoint, we made it more difficult for a Trans Woman to move past than a Cis-Male, representing the difficulties trans folk face when getting jobs. At the end of the game, there are game explanations which elaborate on the checkpoints and why a certain identity was disadvantaged in the game.
How I built it
Our team built this app by first brainstorming and sectioning our ideas. We then worked page by page on our code, starting with the intro page and ending with the game explanations page. We worked methodically through each step and worked together to debug any issues. Throughout the whole project we heavily collaborated.
Challenges I ran into
Some challenges we ran into were passing variables from one JavaScript page to the next, formatting images and buttons, and making the game pawns move through the game board in snake fashion.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud of making our game pawns move through the game board, the aesthetics of the game, and being able to make a functional board game that aligns with our vision.
What I learned
Some new things that we learned were encoding/decoding query data, how to use flexbox, and using JavaScript to alter html. Although we’ve coded websites before, no one in our team has ever coded a game, or one that is this interactive.
What's next for In Their Shoes
We plan to make the next iterations of our game more advanced by adding more gender and race identities as well as including varying citizenship statuses and sexualities. We also hope to add more checkpoints, such as immigration and mental health struggles. Right now, our default is 3 players, but we hope to allow more/less players. Lastly, although it will be difficult, we aspire to combine multiple identity traits at checkpoints since these issues are often intersectional.
We hosted our project on Azure, allowing anyone with the link to play our board game.
The contests we’d like to be entered for are: Best Presentation, Best Ed Tech Hack, Best Social Activism Hack, Best High School Hack Provided by BU Spark!, The Prettiest Hack, The Ultimate Failed Hack, The Wolfram Award Sponsored by Wolfram Language, Best Gamification for Education Hack Sponsored By Microsoft.
Our links are below
The first link is our pitch PowerPoint. The second link is our research and checkpoint explanations. The third link is our code which we uploaded on repl.it for viewing purposes.
If you'd like to play our board game, this is our Azure link. link
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