The Story of Spark Club: Part 2 - Ideas
So, here is the second part of our story and I am so excited to share it with you all. If you still haven’t read our first part of The Spark Club story, click on the link here and read about the experience on how I came up with the idea of The Spark Club and the challenges I faced during my journey including the onset of COVID.
I always had this one thing in my mind which was “Child education is very important and if I am even a tiny part of their growth, this would prove my worth in this world”.
Doing a shoot for a promotional film for a 2 week STEM workshop a couple of days before covid struck. The film never got out because all our workshops got canceled
Our first part of the story ended where we were on the part where the pandemic has just entered and this blog post is entirely on what measures we took to overcome the obstacles that came with the lockdown. Fully geared up for a 3 month summer camp, our dreams fell apart when the lockdown was announces.
Moving forward
I brainstormed with my husband, Rachit, and our close friend Surya, to get some solution for moving us forward. While earlier we were thinking only from the perspective of having online workshops but deep inside I knew that I wanted something more. I always had this question revolving in my mind “Will parents have ample amount of time left in their plates during lockdown to sit with children during workshops??” Well… It always ended as No!
Trying my online workshop for the first time with my niece and nephew
Online workshops?
I tried a couple of online tutorials with my niece and nephew who were based in Seattle but the mistake I did was just sticking to the same idea irrespective of the situation we were in. We understood that the same workshop’s wouldn’t work onlinne because of the amount of material and help needed, for which parent’s weren’t really free. After thorough brainstorming, I started looking for ideas on a totally different line but based on the core idea of kids having FUN WHILE LEARNING which was and will always be the base of The Spark Club.
Children’s newspaper?
Then, I came up with the idea of creating kid’s newspapers but later dropped it as we thought that not all kids would like to read something attentively if there is no action involved in them to perform. We printed a few newspapers as tests and sent them across, we understood that it is a great platform for news, but we couldn’t find a way to teach children and make them have fun with newspapers.
Kits with a workshop?
After we dropped our first couple of ideas, we then started thinking about a couple of other things. This thing of having an online workshop in some or another way always tickled my mind. We started brainstorming myself on what changes can we make in this idea of having an online workshop so that parents don’t actually have to sit around the children attending.
Luckily, we came up with the idea of providing the kids with workshop kits all prepared beforehand wherein all they would have to do is assemble them according to our guidance and workshop needs. I was now fully satisfied on my part that if we provide them with all the things needed, it would remove the overhead parameter of parents not having to attend the workshops too. And believe me, it was a great success!
Some sheets which were part of our initial STEM kits
Partial success, what next?
With growing days and workshops happening, I wanted to do something more to help kids learn and have fun. During the lockdown, we developed this habit of playing a lot of board games, and ultimately, I came across a simple idea that kids love playing games too and why not take a step out of my comfort zone and create a board game for kids that would revolve around science. Frankly speaking, I saw a lot of online games being developed and listed in mobile phone stores during the lockdown which was based on the idea to have fun with families at home. This is where I thought why not do something for kids. While every kid won’t have a phone to play with, we could build science board games and physically ship them to them.
Get back to studying
The first thing we decided was to take a course on how to actually develop science-based board games and what parameters do we need to take into account while creating one. I then joined a course provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on game designing. After my thorough research of the market, I found that there are fewer to no organizations that are working on providing science-based board games.
Now, for the first time, I was in the process of building a game by keeping multiple parameters into account such as interaction level of kids, engagement of kids while playing the games, thinking and understanding capabilities, etc. It was one scary roller coaster ride for me. But I was fixated on doing it. I had to make sure that any kid playing this science board game should LEARN, have FUN, and wouldn’t feel the game to be monotonous.
After thousands of iterations, we developed two games during the lockdown namely “SUNSHINE” and “GERMS AND LEAPS”. Talking a little about Sunshine, “It is an adventurous, fun-filled, board game based on the phenomena of sunlight. This game will silently teach your kids that sunlight is made with 7 different colors, how it’s affected by solar eclipses, rainbows, and black holes”.
First version of sunshine printed on our home printer
Our second game Germs and Leaps was built more on the fact that kids being in lockdown could relate to it and moreover it was the need of the hour. Germs and Leaps, a simple but exciting game to teach your children the importance of washing their hands for killing bacteria & viruses which is imperative for children at this time. It was based on the idea of having ‘clean hands’ as soon as possible while avoiding germs & taking help from soaps & sanitizers. It was such an exciting time for all of us!
I hope that you liked this part and stay tuned and follow us on Facebook and Instagram for the upcoming third part of the story of The Spark Club.
This story was originally posted on Medium