Save The Turtle Puzzle by Zagazoo Busy Bag is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2020 A' Design Award in Toys, Games and Hobby Products Design Competition Category.
IronToy· 2020
Save The Turtle Puzzle
Client: Zagazoo Busy Bag
A' Design Award Winner in Toy Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #98043The Design
About Save The Turtle Puzzle
“Save The Turtle” introduces to 4 -to 8 years old children the harmful impact of plastic on the sea and sea creatures simply and entertainingly through a maze puzzle. Children play different quizzes and win by moving the sea turtle through the path until it reaches a safe place. Repeating and solving multiple quizzes encourages children to change their behavior towards the use of plastic and reinforces the idea.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Save The Turtle Puzzle is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Save The Turtle Puzzle is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Save The Turtle Puzzle is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Interviews
Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The puzzle aims to educate children about the harmful impact of our human waste, especially plastic on other creatures such as sea turtles in a playful way they understand. Zagazoo Team therefore wanted to present this important idea and global situation in a fun and playful way that children understand, since it’s tackling two topics many children love and definitely relate to: animals and sea/ocean. Solving a puzzle multiple times helps reinforcing the knowledge through repetition.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
The main focus was to create a flexible maze puzzle, that can have “endless” layouts yet easy for children to assemble, play with and learn from. We wanted children to understand this environmental topic through play and pass it on to others. Zagazoo wants children to become more environmentally aware. Save The turtle” helps children to have an/a better understanding of this important environmental issue and therefore be able to change their everyday behavior towards using plastic and dealing with waste in general.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
This design is just the beginning to raise awareness about the harms of plastic and human waste. Zagazoo Busy Bags wants the game to be a method of educating children globally about the environmental problems the earth is facing.
The game can also be developed to be played by older age groups and in different ways.
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to environmental education through Save The Turtle Puzzle has earned recognition at the A' Design Award - could you share the journey of transforming this crucial message into an engaging maze puzzle for children?
Repetition is key when it comes to learning a message. We wanted to create a creative tool to repeat a single message. Creating a dynamic puzzle was our answer for that problem. The first step was to acknowledge that play is children's best learning method. The second step was how we could creatively link a message with a game, that isn't only fun, but that can be played multiple times.
The research behind Save The Turtle Puzzle revealed that children effectively spread environmental awareness to adults - what inspired you to leverage this child-to-adult influence in your design approach?
Children’s attitudes and bravery to express what is right or wrong is certainly an inspiration to adults. As adults we can often think our actions don’t matter, but seening children sticking to a right/wise decision can generally help us and guide us.
How did you balance the educational aspects about plastic pollution with the playful elements in Save The Turtle Puzzle to maintain both entertainment value and environmental message for 4-8 year olds?
The educational message had to be playful, memorable and creative for children to play. If the core environmental message is wrapped in play, then children will be the ones seeking it. By involving playing in the mixture, we guarantee a balance between both aspects.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- "Save The Turtle" explains to children aging 4-8 how harmful plastic is for sea turtles, (as they mistake it for food and die) through a maze puzzle game. In each quiz, they have to save the turtle from the harmful plastic (visualized as a bottle and plastic bag) and take it to a safe place. Doing more and more quizzes strengthens the idea in their minds that plastic is harmful.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The maze part consists of 4 square pieces and a frame, so in total it is 220 mm x 220 mm x 5 mm. It comes along with a booklet (170 x 140 mm) and small wooden pieces: 2 turtles, 2 bottles and 2 plastic bags, each is 10 mm x 10 mm x 3 mm. The packaging is a pouch 280 x 250 mm.
- Tags
- save turtle, sustainable, ecosystem, eco-friendly, edutainment, out of home play, busy bag, environment
- Production Technology
- The puzzle is made of durable MDF wood accompanied with a printable booklet. Ideally, the game should be 100% eco-friendly or 100% recyclable. This was not fully realizable/or feasible at that time, but it is plastic-free.
- Design Challenge
- Solving a maze from a booklet is not a very simple task for a 4 or 5 years-old child, as the 4 maze pieces look very similar to each other. Stickers with different sea elements like a star, bubbles, etc. were put on the pieces of the maze to make it more identifiable. The game includes two different levels that make the game more challenging and suitable for a broader age bracket.
- Research
- Children will not change their behavioral patterns, if they do not understand and memorize the reasons for this change. Establishing a new piece of information in the brain of a child could be done through repetition, but education and repetition should not be boring. That's why learning combined with play is a perfect tool. The team conducted the research before and after the game was prototyped. It was clear that children memorized how dangerous plastic is for sea turtles and spread awareness to adults.
- Inspiration
- Awareness campaigns about human activities that are harming the sea and sea creatures are growing stronger than ever before.
It has become everybody's responsibility to save the environment through sensible and responsible actions. How about children? Are they even aware of the problem, or is it about time that they start to take part in this movement? - Project Duration
- The project started in April 2019 in Cairo, Egypt and launched in August 2019 in Cairo. The product was available for sale on Zagazoo's social media platforms starting August 2019. Ever since it has become one of the most selling products.
- Operation Flow
- The game starts with an explanation of how plastic is harming the sea turtles. The child can start with any quiz (out of 24 quizzes) and tries to imitate the puzzle quiz seen in the booklet by putting the 4 wooden puzzle pieces in the right place. Then he/she solves the maze quiz by taking the sea turtle to a safe place, where the plant is and avoids the plastic bottle and bag.
- Team Members
- Co-Founder of Zagazoo: Marina Adel Zaghloul
- Image Credits
- Image #1 : Photographer Marina Zaghloul / Illustrator Christine Zaghloul / Save the Turtle, 2019
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