Zero Hero – card game for circular skills

Title: Zero Hero (educational game for schoolchildren, developing circular skills).

Client: Antakalnis City Lab. This organisation promotes zero waste movement to visitors of various ages.

Challenge/task: How can circular skills and recycling become entertaining for schoolchildren? A task was to develop a learning format that educators could use with groups of children (7-11 years).

Solution: A set of play cards to play in teams led by the educators. We divided the topic of zero-waste into five fields — recycling, composting, plants, renewable energy, and cooperation with neighbours — and developed subtopics and questions for each field. The educational game ZERO HERO sparks a conversation between school kids and teachers about ecology, a no-waste lifestyle, and a conscious, nature-friendly environment. Because of the illustrations (by Agnė Lasinskienė), the subtopics have a wide range of interpretations.

A game set consists of 5 topic cards and 50 cards, most of which fit several zero-waste topics. It also includes a list of orientational questions for educators.

How it works:

1.  Children are divided into teams of 3 to 6 players;
2. Cards are divided equally among players. Depending on the number of players, everyone gets 1-5 cards. Players in teams help each other. The goal is to eliminate all the cards in the team.
3. The game master (educator) picks one of five topic cards and, asks open questions concerning the picked topics, and opens the topic on the table with a short introduction.Then, the game master asks a question about the topic (e.g., Can you grow veggies in the city? Where can you do that? etc.).
4. Players should find and give the card that corresponds with the answer to this question or topic. Players should explain each card – why does one think it answers the question?
5. If the game master approves the answer, the card is thrown away.
6. The team that gets rid of all the cards first is the winner – ZERO HERO.

Instructions in Lithuanian can be found in Miesto laboratorija website.

Team:
concept – Julius Narkūnas + Jekaterina Lavrinec;
beautifully detailed illustrations – Agnė Lasinskienė.