The Waterwise Show
A playful, immersive, audio-led education experience for the Water Corporation.
A narrative-based, interactive audio play and accompanying resources that enables students to learn through play and teachers to easily adapt based on their schedule.
Client: Water Corporation
Skillset: Service design, ideation, human-centred design coaching, co-design, content strategy, workshop facilitation, user testing
The project at a glance.
Water Corporation’s education offering had remain unchanged for many years. On the surface the program was a success but with a new mandate of reaching more students than ever before, the Water Corporation knew that the program in its current state wouldn’t be up for the challenge.
It was time for a complete overhaul of the program. Using human-centred design, and co-design with teachers, a new immersive educational experience was created that delighted both teachers and their students.
The Waterwise Show is an immersive experience that transports students with audio led narratives delivered via headphones, using silent disco-like tech. It engages students through play and encourages them to see the value and importance of water, helping them to understand that that no one is too small to make a difference.
The approach.
The incursion program needed to consider a layered audience - the educators who delivered the program, the teachers who booked the program, and the students who engaged with the program. As part of the design process we needed to consider how we’d engage with diverse audiences at each level.
Key stages:
Ideation workshops run with a blended team, including the theatre company Side Pony, Water Corporation educators and experience designers.
Co-design with teachers to build upon the desirability/feasibility of the experience and explore how might we extend the content in the classrooms.
Content and resource design this included content strategy - aligning the content to Australia’s National Sustainability Curriculum and individual subject curriculum to get buy-in from teachers.
The solution, in a bit more detail.
The Waterwise Show is an immersive, audio led experience that allows students to learn through play. Over the course of the experience, students’ navigate three distinct interactive stories that are designed to hook into the National Sustainability Cross-Curriculum priority objectives - helping time poor teachers tick it off their list. The audio narratives engage students' emotionally and imaginatively during the show and later in the classroom with subject aligned resources.
The Show was created in answer to three key needs from three very different groups:
Water Corporation’s duty to Western Australians is to protect and manage our water supply and part of this is instilling ‘waterwise’ behaviours in the community. It was critical to drive more engagement with more year groups across more schools.
Teachers are continually looking for better ways to engage their students while ensuring they’re getting through the required curriculum. Dependent on their motivations, some teachers look for support in easing the pressure while others are looking for new innovative tools that enable them in their roles.
Students wanted to learn through play, something that allowed them to be more active participants rather than passive observers.
