Refugee Simulation project
INTRODUCTION
In our refugee simulation project, we made an interactive simulation for the people of exhibition to experience. It represented the course a syrian refugee would take in the course to get out of syria and away from the syrian conflict. This was meant as an educational thing intending to bring knowledge of the syrian crisis to the people "playing" the simulation. In the simulation, people were given character sheets, which contained objectives and the money the refugees would have started with as well as your name, age, etc. You then tried to get to the objective (usually a country) through all the countries a refugee would have to go through to get to the objective country.
WHY WE DID A SIMULATION
We decided to do a simulation after a long process of evaluating the syrian crisis. After reading about all kinds of stuff about the crisis, we decided as a class to do a simulation. We though this would be a fun and engaging method by which to inform the people that were signed up about the things going on in the syrian crisis. we decided to split people up by stations representing countries and I was made one of the four lead designers for the project.
ARTICLES FOR INSPIRATION
This is my Syrian Refugee Event Sequence and Syrian Refugee Character Sheet. These were based off real people in articles we read in the beginning of this project. The one I read is The Dream Boat, an article from the New York Times. It is long, but a great read if you have the time to do so.
LEAD DESIGNER DUTIES
As a Lead designer for the project, I was in charge of making the character sheets for this project among other things. We took the character sheets above and vastly changed them adding more information and changing them into playable characters for the people in the simulation to impersonate. This is a link to the folder that contained all of the character sheets that were used in the simulation. We also had to sort out all of the money that everyone would get in the simulation, a much more daunting task than it seemed. We were also in charge of the logistics and layout of who, where, and when the simulation was taking place.
PLAY-TESTS
In preparation for the simulation, we did several play-tests of the simulation. I will talk about each of those playtests here.
-First Play-test: This play-test was conducted about a month and a half out from exhibition, so it was basically just our first run through of the simulation to see what it would be like. We set this up on a dirt side lot and had no borders for our countries, so it was very crude but still very effective at showing what everyone needed to improve on.
-Second Play-test: I remember this one very clearly because it was the first play-test to include money, which ended up being a pain in the neck for the lead designers. We used monopoly money in this simulation all the way through the final (where we used fake Euros), and it made the simulation much better than the first because it added many choices for the player on how much they were willing to spend, when to stop negotiating, etc. This was also the first time the stations/counties used props which also helped a ton.
-Third Play-test: This was a play-test done with where freshman were the refugees. This was the first time were were doing the simulation for guests. This was also the first time we laid out our final area where we would be doing the simulation for exhibition, which was vastly different from the area we had been working out of originally which was just a dirt lot.
-Final Play-test: This was done with other 10th graders. To me this was the least interesting play-test because very little changed from the last one for the lead designers. Logistically the last one had worked fine and the thing that needed the most improvements were the stations/countries themselves and getting enough practice for the in before exhibition. There were also a few small things for us to tweak after this play-test.
EXHIBITION DAY
We actually did two run throughs of the simulation on the day of. The first was with the 8th graders from the middle school, who seemed very frightened by us. Their teachers said they learned lots from the simulation. For the main event (with the adults and parents), we made everyone who had signed up (about half of the people that came) a packet with their character sheet, Euros, and anything else they needed. It was really cool getting to see everyone go though and experience all of our hard work and also experience what it would have been like to be a refugee. If I had to do it again I would make it so the players would have more choices (an ongoing struggle though the project) but that opinion was almost only held by me.
In our refugee simulation project, we made an interactive simulation for the people of exhibition to experience. It represented the course a syrian refugee would take in the course to get out of syria and away from the syrian conflict. This was meant as an educational thing intending to bring knowledge of the syrian crisis to the people "playing" the simulation. In the simulation, people were given character sheets, which contained objectives and the money the refugees would have started with as well as your name, age, etc. You then tried to get to the objective (usually a country) through all the countries a refugee would have to go through to get to the objective country.
WHY WE DID A SIMULATION
We decided to do a simulation after a long process of evaluating the syrian crisis. After reading about all kinds of stuff about the crisis, we decided as a class to do a simulation. We though this would be a fun and engaging method by which to inform the people that were signed up about the things going on in the syrian crisis. we decided to split people up by stations representing countries and I was made one of the four lead designers for the project.
ARTICLES FOR INSPIRATION
This is my Syrian Refugee Event Sequence and Syrian Refugee Character Sheet. These were based off real people in articles we read in the beginning of this project. The one I read is The Dream Boat, an article from the New York Times. It is long, but a great read if you have the time to do so.
LEAD DESIGNER DUTIES
As a Lead designer for the project, I was in charge of making the character sheets for this project among other things. We took the character sheets above and vastly changed them adding more information and changing them into playable characters for the people in the simulation to impersonate. This is a link to the folder that contained all of the character sheets that were used in the simulation. We also had to sort out all of the money that everyone would get in the simulation, a much more daunting task than it seemed. We were also in charge of the logistics and layout of who, where, and when the simulation was taking place.
PLAY-TESTS
In preparation for the simulation, we did several play-tests of the simulation. I will talk about each of those playtests here.
-First Play-test: This play-test was conducted about a month and a half out from exhibition, so it was basically just our first run through of the simulation to see what it would be like. We set this up on a dirt side lot and had no borders for our countries, so it was very crude but still very effective at showing what everyone needed to improve on.
-Second Play-test: I remember this one very clearly because it was the first play-test to include money, which ended up being a pain in the neck for the lead designers. We used monopoly money in this simulation all the way through the final (where we used fake Euros), and it made the simulation much better than the first because it added many choices for the player on how much they were willing to spend, when to stop negotiating, etc. This was also the first time the stations/counties used props which also helped a ton.
-Third Play-test: This was a play-test done with where freshman were the refugees. This was the first time were were doing the simulation for guests. This was also the first time we laid out our final area where we would be doing the simulation for exhibition, which was vastly different from the area we had been working out of originally which was just a dirt lot.
-Final Play-test: This was done with other 10th graders. To me this was the least interesting play-test because very little changed from the last one for the lead designers. Logistically the last one had worked fine and the thing that needed the most improvements were the stations/countries themselves and getting enough practice for the in before exhibition. There were also a few small things for us to tweak after this play-test.
EXHIBITION DAY
We actually did two run throughs of the simulation on the day of. The first was with the 8th graders from the middle school, who seemed very frightened by us. Their teachers said they learned lots from the simulation. For the main event (with the adults and parents), we made everyone who had signed up (about half of the people that came) a packet with their character sheet, Euros, and anything else they needed. It was really cool getting to see everyone go though and experience all of our hard work and also experience what it would have been like to be a refugee. If I had to do it again I would make it so the players would have more choices (an ongoing struggle though the project) but that opinion was almost only held by me.
This was my Essay Quiz. I chose to write on the topic of the history of the syrian crisis among the ones we could choose between because that was what I had studied and in my opinion that was what I had the most knowledge of. I was proud of this essay and I put a lot of work into it.
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This was the piece of work that I chose to share with the world. It is not a handout but I thought it was much more meaningful than one. This is the map of our simulation and how the players moved though the area. Each green outline is a country and the red lines are how the players moved from country to country. This took a lot of work to make both literally (drawing it) but also making it correct and making sure we had the space available to go in.
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