Merry Stems

Title page of the game
Mini game 2
Mini game 1

Inspiration

Dana Scully, a doctor and a criminal investigator, is one of the main characters of the X Files, and the origin of the term 'The Scully Effect', a phenomenon where girls who had grown up watching The X Files were more likely to pursue careers in STEM as adults. This led me to understand that exposure to STEM-related media at an early age, especially if it features strong female leads and role models prominent in their respective fields, would leave a positive and lasting impression of STEM fields on young children (especially girls) and lead them to view STEM-related careers as viable career paths for them.

Merry Stems is a play on the term meristematic, referring to undifferentiated cells in plants that are capable of growing into any type of plant tissue, and are often found in the fastest growing, newest portions of a plant.

What it does

Merry Stems is a game designed for children ages 5 to 7 with the goal to introduce them to STEM fields and careers from an early age through mini games and modules exploring responsibilities and skills of various roles, such as computer science, mechanical engineering, medicine, and more. At the end of each mini game, players are presented with a short biography of a prominent female contributor to the field related to the mini game.

How we built it

We built this entire project using Figma. Due to time constraints, we decided that creating a medium-fidelity prototype of our idea would be the goal for the project. We were all beginners in using the platform and first created our wireframes. We then connected the flows to fully prototype our idea. We also consulted with children and parents of children in our target demographic to ensure that our idea would be valuable if implemented.

Challenges we ran into

Our group is formed of three beginners. So, the first challenge we ran into was to get familiarized with the program, how to use the interactions, how to design the frames, and also debug it at the end. Another issue was the time constraint, since we did not have too much time, we couldn't develop the whole program, or use coding as an alternative. Lastly, we had intentions of making our project an app for iPad (since it is a game for kids) but ended up modifying it to be a website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how far we got in the development of our prototype and how much we personally learnt through the hackathon!

What we learned

First thing we learnt was how to use Figma. Then, through the workshops of two different companies, StackAdapt, and Sentry, we got an interesting intro to API's and React. We also got some insights of past students who had different co-ops, and learnt a lot about each other!

What's next for Merry Stems

We want to convert our Figma prototype to a website. We would do this through JavaScript, CSS, and HTML as we are all familiar with the languages and would be able to add the necessary capability.