Watch Out! Ele!

A safety education board-game that is designed to teach elementary school-aged children in É-Dié-Cūn, Honghe County, Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan Province. The game features 3 methods of play, teaching children about local safety hazards.

Collaborators

Original (2023): Yikai Kong, Xuanshuo Chen, Xingyu Lu, Suyang Zhao, Yujia Chen, Jian Chen, Yuxi Gu, Yuxuan Li

Advisor

Year

Project Length

Han Xue

2025

1 Year

Watch Out Ele! process board — the problem: a school noticeboard poster warning about poisonous wild fruits, beside notes that safety education in Honghe County lacks engaging, localized content, what rural students need, and the question of how to deliver locally relevant safety education to children facing unique hazards and language barriers.

Watch Out Ele! process board — field observation: three photographs of the path to school, a suspension bridge over a river, an uncovered reservoir along the hillside path, and the steep, unfenced roads around the school, each with notes on the dangers students face.

Watch Out Ele! process board — research and design criteria: a classroom of students taking a questionnaire, notes from the survey of 48 students and teacher interviews, and four criteria: local, visual, interactive and practical.

Watch Out Ele! process board — ideation: sketches exploring bright colour palettes, board layouts, figurines, the elephant mascot in a hard hat, and game card designs drawn from reference playing cards.

Watch Out Ele! process board — prototyping and testing: a cardboard box prototype with stick-on elephant mascot graphics, cards and a rolled-up board, beside a photo of students gathered around a table playing the prototype, one holding a fan of coloured game cards, with notes on testing with 10 students and the three game-card methods: Q&A, acting and tool selection.

Watch Out Ele! process board — final design: the unfolded box packaging featuring the elephant mascot in a hard hat under the title 小象注意!, next to a photo of the finished board with colour-coded card decks and hazard cards, with notes on the elephant as a local, culturally meaningful mascot and the four card colours for different question categories.

China Thinks Big Conference at Harvard University

Presented our safety education project at the China Thinks Big Conference at Harvard University, sharing how we worked with rural communities to turn local challenges into an engaging learning experience for children.

A student in a red felt elephant hat standing in front of the orange Watch Out! Ele! research poster, with the game's cards and pawns laid out on the table beside it.

Two conference visitors standing at the Watch Out! Ele! poster, one of the team explaining the project to them with the game pieces on the table in front.

A screen under an ornate arched hall reading “CTB 2022-2023 Global Finals Closing Ceremony, April 25, 2023”.

Gamifying Safety Education: A Board-game Approach for Childhood Injury Prevention in Rural Southwestern China

Click to view paper

Watch Out Ele! process board — redesign: a note that after presenting at China Thinks Big at Harvard and hearing from industry professionals, the improvements include making the game more compact for classrooms with limited space and reducing how much teacher facilitation the game requires.

Watch Out Ele! process board — redesigned final design: renders of the tri-folding game box, which opens out into the board, with its orange and navy patterned border, a rules panel, moulded card and pawn compartments, dice, pawns and two categories of question cards, alongside a note that the tri-folding mechanism makes a compact box, opens to be the game board, and stacks the game cards inside for better organization.