Over the summer of 2021, I worked with Professor Ben Ho on a game designed to help people recycle better. The project was motivated by the fact that at Vassar, half of the items in the recycling bin are thrown away due to contamination. In collaboration with Micah Kenfield, the director of sustainability at Vassar, we laid out specific lessons we would like to teach through the game, which boiled down to two main categories — recycling knowledge and environmental consciousness. We then found inspiration in the platform game Doodle Jump, which offered us a template that ensured player engagement. Over the course of developing the game, we encountered a variety of challenges, from technical issues in programming to design barriers that prevented us to get our message across. Supported by Professor Ho’s multidisciplinary expertise, we were able to publish the game on a web host https://simmer.io/@DollarZhu/the-recycling-game. On the Economic research side, we did a literature review of prominent and relevant literature on video games and learning, and we made a series of hypothesis for the game to test. We will collect data during Freshmen Orientation in August and use them to complete the experiment.

My experience this summer was deeply rewarding. Thanks to the mentorship of Professor Ho, I learned an array of useful skills — programming, designing an experiment, making video games for learning. Looking ahead, the experience also set me on a track to do more research on games and behavior.