What This Was About
The Syrian Refugee Project was a project made to inform, explain, and show people the hardships, the risks, and the life of a refugee to those who do not research it. Our goal in the very beginning was to be able to sit on a raio station adn be able to be interviewed for an hour straight about the refugee project, and I Feel like we can do that now. This project is built upon weeks and weeks of reasearch, and a ton of hardwork by the students, including myself, that helped bring this project to life.
Why We Did This
Originally, we planned to have an exhibition or a play. However, a group of students came in during lunch and began to brainstorm what we should do. The general consensus was that we all agreed to disagree. Half the class wanted a play, half the class wanted an exhibition. We decided to o both, and make a simulation. The simulation brought together ideas that we liked from the exhibition; being able to put out information in an imformative way, and the enjoyment of acting and the play-like feel of the play.
The Models. Our Characters, our Sequences
This is our Model Character sheet. We had plenty of these characters, al lof which were edited heavily to be able to fit into the simulation, however their story stayed the same, and everything is as accurate as we could possibly make it while still having them be playable characters.
This is our initial sequence chart, which we used as a modle to make our other charts. These were used to map out a way that the players, or "Refugees" would go through our simulation.
The Lead Designer Experience
As a lead designer, I would go as to say that without the four of us, this simulation would have been a disaster. While all the countries did their won reasearch, we were behin the scenes tweaking things and making sure that they worked, were accurate, andd we were in charge of planning out where the simulation took place, how it worked, and where each station was.
Our job was behind the scenes, as I said, but on the day of exhibiton we were there making sure refugees were enjoying the experience, things were working, and most of all, everyone was enjoying themselves.
Our job was behind the scenes, as I said, but on the day of exhibiton we were there making sure refugees were enjoying the experience, things were working, and most of all, everyone was enjoying themselves.
The First Test
The first playtest was the most confusing. We went out there, we had no props, no actual physical stations, we only ad an idea. But it seemed to work fine. The stations knew the info, and everyone was staying in character. The stations were sticking to character, and their research was acccurate.
The Second Test
The second playtest, was no that different from the first. We had however, cardboard props instead of nothing at all. We had more research in it, and we had a better basis of understand to be able to inform others, however we were still rough around the edges and the route planned for refugees was not made yet.
The Final Test
The final playtest was more of a final rundown. We have all our props, we have our costumes and everything we need for the situation, all we need is to actually get through it. What we did was set up beforehand, and it went as smooth as butter, definetly the best simualation yet, since it was the one we took the most serious and it was the one that meant the most to us before our actual simuatlion.
The Real Deal
This was very stressful. It almost went wrong at the last minute because we didn't have enough character sheets so we had to go print more as the simulation was running. We had people coming in, we had every station working and everyone had enough work to do. It truly felt like all the hard work we had put into this project was finally paying off, and it was all over.
If I were to do this again, I'd definetly spend more time actually planning out what each simulation is going to be doing, since that was the main problem that the playtests had, and it wasn't solved until the final playtest.
If I were to do this again, I'd definetly spend more time actually planning out what each simulation is going to be doing, since that was the main problem that the playtests had, and it wasn't solved until the final playtest.
The Written Test
After we did everything, we had a final test to demonstrate our knowledge of the Syrian REfugee Crisis that is happening in our world today. We had one of 6 ooptions, but I chose to talk about the most important country involved in the Crisis.