THE CHALLENGE

The Arlington Transportation Partners and the City of Arlington hired our team to run a virtual event that would get families to learn about safely using public transportation during COVID. Together we asked; how can we design an experience that doesn’t have kids glued to just another zoom call AND get families to explore new parts of their city?

THE BIG IDEA

Let's make a virtual kid-created block party. Also squirrels!

THE DESIGN PROCESS

We kickstarted the project with a brainstorming meeting with the organizing team to better understand what this annual event that is usually held in person has felt like in the past. The team kept coming back to the idea of a block party so we took this as an inspiration to bring families together virtually in a joyful block-party way.

THE OUTCOME

Together we decided to design a series of virtual experiences that included a virtual block party where families would build their own street out of household materials as well as a city wide game they could play on their phone.

Virtual Block Party

Designed as an interactive TV show we invited children to follow along the adventures of two main characters Shane and Leo. Through role-playing and live tutorials children had to help the two characters meet in a specific spot by creating public transportation vehicles for them- while learning about how to safely use the different buses, metro lines and shared bicycles.

nuts about transportation game

In addition we created a custom mobile game called Nuts About Transportation using the Hive Mechanic platform. The text based game featuring local community characters, had families help a squirrel called Hazel gather her family members to a socially distant picnic in downtown Arlington.