We are delighted to share a blog written by student Mahatheer, from Westside Middle School Academy, who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2021-22 GSL Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community!
We went through many difficulties in trying to figure out we wanted to make for our board, but eventually we decided to create a medieval board game where you are knights and you clean up a castle.
Project Summary
Hello!
We are The Simply Cleaners. A team of 8th Grade students ages 13-14 from Westside Middle School Academy. Our team consists of:
- Lily, Aavonah, Dhylan (Box/Board Designer)
- Cullan, Toby, Sam (Game Piece Designers)
- Ashar (Card Designer)
- Chase, Mia, Angel (Newspaper Article Writers)
- Mahatheer (Blog Writer)
- Erickson, Luis, Richard (Social Media)
We are a group of schoolmates who joined this year’s competition in order to raise awareness of the importance of our environment, primarily the pollution created by people and the impacts of recycling.
In this year’s competition, we have taken up 4 Sustainable Development Goals:
- SDG 6 — Clean Water and Sanitation
- SDG 13 — Climate Action
- SDG 14 — Life Below Water
- SDG 4 — Quality Education
Multiple dangers can occur when a great amount of trash is produced. Americans alone produce 254 million tons of trash and they only recycle 76 million tons out of the 254 million. The rest of that trash either ends up on land or in the ocean.
The goal of our project is to be able to create a board game (Castle Cleanup) that teaches elementary students the importance of recycling. Our game takes place in medieval times and the objective is to clean up the castle. We want to teach the younger generation what the effects of pollution are and how they can stop it.
The Journey
Every GSL team is giving their all to create their projects. For Simply Cleaners (our team name), planning and discussing was the first step we took in kick-starting our board game.
Our first step – to create a fundraising campaign in order to buy materials to build our board game. For our fundraiser, we decided to create a dodgeball tournament, but in order to have a successful; fundraiser, we need to publicize it.
That is where our Instagram comes in. Our Instagram has posts of how much progress we’ve made and it shouts out our fundraiser. We have also created posters around our school to create hype about our tournament. To draw even more people in we put the price of the teams at $5 a person, had snacks at the tournament, and the winner got a pizza party. Overall we made around $600 from the tournament, which is more than we need to make a board game. So we decided that we were to create multiple high-quality board games.
We are also creating a newspaper article that is in collaboration with our school’s magazine, The Westside Warriors. It is vital that we create our newspaper with quality and haste, because if we are not the first to submit our newspaper then ours might not be collaborated with.
The main item we are working on right now is the creation of our actual board game. We have spread our $600 budget on 10+ high-quality board games. We are still working on game pieces, board game colors, and card designs.
Simply Cleaners has exciting ideas in mind. Our game consists of a board game, cards, game pieces, and a medieval adventure into recycling. So far we have 3-D printed the game pieces like the characters and the obstacles around the board game.
The Next Chapter
A Sneak Peek into the Future:
We are partnering with Park Avenue and Westside Warriors. We are teaching the 3rd-grade kids of Park Avenue and teaching them the importance of recycling.
Thank you for taking the time to read our Global Goals post! We hope this has sparked your interest in our project and hope to be able to educate you further through our work found below!
From,
Simply Cleaners
