to solve plastic waste • in Turkey

To teach design thinking and other 21 th century skills I was invited to do a workshop (similar as we did a workshop in Pune – India last year) at Bilkent Laboratory and International School (Blis) in Ankara Turkey.
In preperation to this workshop, we first gave exactly the same workshop to the teachers of the school on their yearly education day as one of the courses provided. These teachers have different nationalities but very similar passion about teaching kids plus best of all: a critical thinking attitude. So afternmaking them design a game concept plus prototype as a solution to create waste awareness. They asked good question about the process and end-results and the matters around playing.
They also got instantly interested the scale this workshop inside their curriculum sice one of their pupils projects is to combine their personal passion (play) with a societal topic (waste).
  
Since I was in Ankara and got linked to the Bilkent University, I managed to recruit students from different faculties to collaborate on executing the game concepts to create real games together with the teenagers from Blis.
The final workshops with children in the age between 9 to 18 was done in april, close to ‘Children’s Day’ and together 7 great game designs have been created with very individual approaches varying from an interactive trashbin to a multiplayer – multi levels game adventure to travel through different worlds and conditions to safe different animals lifes from the damage of waste.
Everyone was impressed with the high level outcome, while enjoying each step inside the workshop taking 4 hours of hard work.
Many topics were addressed and asked about during reflection. These students have given me a hard time to answer several extremely clever questions, which makes me feel so proud to realise that they have been playing around their mindset and were truly engaged!
Special Thanks to the help of the foundation: Dutch Culture in the program: Genc Kultur.
Will be continued….
PS: One teacher executed the workshop with all materials provided himself independently, with me being online via skype to give the reward to the best winning team! And compliments to teacher Alan to execute the workshop on his own!
(Unfortunatly we can not share photo’s from the children without approval from their parents)