Still Good to Eat: A Food-Waste Prevention Game
Second Harvest
Second Harvest is Canada’s largest food rescue organization and is a global thought leader on perishable food redistribution. They operate at the intersection of hunger relief and environmental protection, tackling food loss and waste through food redistribution, research, awareness, and education. Second Harvest works with thousands of food businesses from across the supply chain, utilizing logistics and technology to reduce the amount of edible food going to waste. Healthy surplus food is redirected to thousands of charities and non-profits across the country, providing millions of Canadians experiencing food insecurity access to the nourishment they need.
The Need
Second Harvest has made tremendous progress in reducing food waste in Canada. In their 36 years of business, they have prevented over 162 million pounds of greenhouse gas equivalents from entering the atmosphere, and rescued and redistributed 53 million pounds of food. While these are already incredible feats on their own, Second Harvest believes that their impact can be expanded by prompting better food waste reduction at the household level. A lack of engaging and accurate education on food waste is preventing a shift toward large-scale food rescue.
Second Harvest plans to address this challenge by informing food buyers in homes and community kitchens about ways to extend the lifespan of different food products, and by encouraging them to implement and share practical, daily food recovery and storage best practices and habits. Their hope is that these habits will help food buyers extend the life of the food they purchase and positively impact large-scale food waste reduction efforts through small daily actions.
The Challenge
Second Harvest wanted to produce an interactive 3D game to help clients reduce food waste in their own homes and community kitchens. Their existing training includes live learning webinars and self-directed learning resources.
While Second Harvest has knowledgeable and talented subject matter experts (SMEs), they didn’t have the game-building resources that were required to create the learning game.
The Solution
Drawing from Robert Gagne’s 9 Levels of Learning and guided by game-based learning principles, Enable’s Learning Experience Design (LXD) team worked closely with Second Harvest’s SMEs and learning team to design and build a game that educates people about food storage, including a reward system, and drives learning and motivation through feedback.
English second language users, marginalized communities, and user accessibility were considered. The language is simple and clear, avoiding idioms, colloquialisms, and slang. Audio and narration are built into the game so content is available in a second format.
Unity Games
Enable’s developers use the Unity Game Engine to create interactive and immersive learning games that engage learners and deliver key learning in a fun and familiar way. With a flexible development platform, multithreaded programming, robust DevOps tools, and the support of an active community, creating games for learning using Unity offers our clients another medium to transfer information and learning.
The Outcome
Enable completed a content analysis to determine what learning material existed and if there were any gaps that needed to be closed with the help of Second Harvest SMEs. After completing a content analysis, the LXD team and Enable’s game developers brainstormed the look and feel of the game, including different levels that align to gaming principles.
Enable’s LXD team translated the information, provided as PDFs and links, into digestible facts and feedback that could be integrated into a playable game. They created dynamic storyboards of text that aligned with the logic and format our game developer needed to input and revise everything as he created the game.
A reward system was built into the game to generate motivation and promote retention of what was learned. It also allows the learner to unlock fun facts and best practices (bonus content) that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Feedback is provided to learners so they can learn from incorrect choices. If someone selects an incorrect answer, feedback is provided as another opportunity to learn.
Localization for other languages was implemented, with both text and generated audio. Currently the only languages implemented are English and French, but other languages can be added.
If you’d like to chat about learning experience design, gamification, or how Enable can help you begin your organization’s learning journey, schedule a call with one of our team.