The island of Lamu is a part of an archipelago in Kenya’s southeast. In comparison to other parts of Kenya and the rest of the globe, it is a remote and rural area where residents do not have the same access to contemporary educational materials. The Kenya Red Cross Society’s IOMe005 Innovation Hub attempts to combat these disparities by providing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) toolkits to the Lamu children. Generally speaking, STEM fields are frequently associated with stigmas and preconceptions that steer girls away from these disciplines. This phenomena also exists in Lamu, which may make it difficult for girls to respond to STEM toolkits provided in schools.

The design goal of this project was therefore defined to design a serious board game which sparks the interest of the young girls of Lamu and help them feel confident when engaging in STEM education. The intervention should create positive interactions on which girls can fall back when facing stereotypes or other alike incidents.

The report first presents the IOMe as the client of this project and Lamu as the area of study. The assignment of developing both the game and the method to design this game is then clarified, along with the approach adopted to carry out this project.

The information needed to comprehend the design choices is provided by a review of the pertinent literature combined with observations and insights gathered from the research and design activities during the field trip. These insights concern the context of Lamu, the current situation regarding STEM education, the potential of playful learning, and especially serious games, for the solution space and finally existing methods for designing games.

These methods inspired the development of a canvas which consists of two tools that guide the designers at the IOMe in generating concepts for serious games and evaluating them, respectively. This canvas is regarded as the method which supported the elaboration of the final game concept for this project.

The findings of the field research also allowed to understand the needs and wishes of the end-users of the game, depict the current interactions they have with STEM and illustrate the desired situation to be achieved by this design intervention. Besides, they indicated the important requirements to be met by the final design.

Next, the chosen concept for this project is then revealed. It is a board game which mirrors the environment of Lamu. Players start “at home” and must arrive “at school”, by moving their pawn on a path on the board, but encounter challenges on their way. These challenges are embedded in cards with questions that the players must answer to win points. The game encourages the girls to observe their surroundings critically and from a scientific point of view.

A final prototype was tested with ten girls at a school of Lamu. The insights collected from the test enabled to make a preliminary evaluation of how well the final design performs with regards to the specified requirements. Furthermore, the design iterations which led to developing this final prototype are introduced.

To conclude, the outcomes of this project have shown that CHANUA is well designed to not only meet the end user’s needs but also contribute to amplifying the client’s exposure to the community and empower secondary stakeholders. The game fits well in the context as it brings innovation with a new energy to a low-resource setting. Besides, the canvas serves as the first example of brainstorming tool specifically developed for the IOMe to keep on developing serious games. Finally, recommendations for future work, such as involving the outer social circles of the end users in such a project, are listed.