Know Your Trash! Building an interactive teaching aid to learn waste segregation
An exploration of physical computing’s application in education
The spark
As a frequent traveler and commuter, a recurring itch for me as I traversed bus stops, train stations, airports etc. was seeing overflowing garbage disposal cans.
A closer look would reveal that the waste in the bins was obviously not disposed correctly, resulting in a painful experience for the person who does end up having to segregate this. If this person doesn’t do the heavy lifting, compostable and recyclable waste ends up going to incinerators or landfills because of how they’ve been rendered unusable.
As the module began and I started exploring possibilities for applications of physical computing and this seemed like a meaningful and much needed application. I combined forces with Janhavi Kamble, fellow interaction design enthusiast and a trusted friend and got to work.
Our Process
To be able to come up with a satisfactory intervention, we decided to follow the human centred design approach while simultaneously tinkering with Arduino, breadboards, sensors etc. here’s what we did
1.Studied the garbage disposal process at the point of disposal
Understood what was the user’s struggle that was leading to wrongful disposal through observation and contextual inquiry.
(hint : It’s not knowing what goes where)
2. Explored various possibilities of intervention
Understood that the earlier we intervened, the better. This gave us our target group, primary school children.
3. Brainstormed and prototyped different methods of instruction
We decided to go with the Guerilla Teaching approach, our takeaway was the most impactful learning happens when the learner is unaware that something is being taught. It had to be a game, a fun one at that.
4. Designed the model, iterated for fun
Our interactive model had to replicate the real world experience of a person disposing garbage, but also make it fun.
This is where we consulted academic papers studying how early digital game developers translated real world physical games into successful virtual counterparts. We learnt three things here, anything we designed had to
- Have a clear goal and challenge for the student
- Engage the student’s curiosity
- Have an element of fantasy involved
5. User feedback and testing
Once the prototype of our model was on its feet, we took it to users both from our target group and beyond. To our delight, we had users engaging in conversation about waste segregation, discussing which one goes where and googling about the compositions of things such as paper coffee mugs, grocery bags etc.
Here’s a video of the installation from the User Testing phase. Enjoy!
“Although eggshells are dry, they go in wet waste? Wow!”
- 6 year old Adi, our first play tester.
6. The way ahead
We realised certain bottlenecks that appeared in the process and were able to articulate improvements aligned to the cornerstones for design that we articulated in step 4.
7. Further Application
A welcome realisation for us was that the model we had developed could be applied to study various kind of segregation based learning goals. We are seeing the possibility of this emerging as a standalone tool that can be modified as per the facilitator (teacher, parents, siblings etc.) and be applied for learning a range of different things.
This model was developed as a part of our academic work at National Institute of Design. Any thoughts, suggestions or feedback you might have will fuel my learning journey. Please feel free to get in touch.
