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Innovation school is a program that Maker’s Asylum holds all year round to educate maker culture to young students from the 8th to the 12th grade but is open to all ages. The program involves kits that are sent to your household from Maker’s Asylum and students can learn to build them over 10 one-to-one sessions with maker mentors, who are skilled makers. I had the opportunity to be a maker mentor for a brief while and it was a delight discussing ideas, problems and making with young bright minds.

I wondered about these kits, and worked on a few myself during my internship at Maker’s Asylum. As the students upon completing 3 skills have the opportunity to engage in a residency at Maker’s Asylum, so I thought we should play a game.

We instructed the students to bring their kits back from home, from the shelve where they were displayed after completion, with the sole intent to destroy what they made. It may sound evil, and it may have been, but it was for an important cause.

On their way to Maker’s Asylum, the students crash landed on a deserted island! They were split into three groups and were locked into three labs in Maker’s Asylum, which represented the island. All they have are their skills, their kits, and their teamwork to circumvent survival challenges. Each chamber had one invigilator to supply the survival challenges, and if there wasn’t a solution in 20 minutes, they would lose one of the three survival tokens I have provided them in the beginning of the game. Lose all three and you failed, objective of the game was to survive the challenges, find a way to communicate with the other teams (their kits had an ESP32 microcontroller that could communicate over low frequency bluetooth), and escape the island together.

The game triggered the inner child in all of them as they were all fascinated by the effect this game was providing, as it was based on an escape room. Some students made some crazy contraptions and detectors for food and others built rotating skewers to grill food. Most of all, they took their kits home in shambles, just the raw electronic parts, ready to be reassembled in a new form once more.

Repurpose Island was a game dedicated to introducing breaking things and repurposing the parts. To be comfortable breaking means to be comfortable making.

During my internship at Maker’s Asylum, Repurpose Island was conducted upto three times. With each version, I continued to extract myself as the gamemaster to make this game as unbiased and replay able as possible.

Version 1 was dedicated entirely to dismantling the kits. The rules were soft and the doors to the labs I had left open, which played into the favor of these unruly children who would break into each others territories often. I also realized that I had stumped them with the food and hunger challenge as their first one. They needed to be eased in with a more direct clue.

Version 2 had a different group of students and we had a lot more kits this time. The doors to the labs were shut until they figured out how to communicate wirelessly. The challenges eased them into the flow of repurposing. This time I felt the design can be adjusted to be more fun for the facilitators too.

Version 3 had random cards for the facilitators of each room to draw, this added a fun sense of randomness to the mix. The rulebook was handy as it drew the boundary around what works as a solution and what does not. This version also suggested design pathways for those designing the kits to consider this game, by adding parts that are not repeated.