Student Reflection - Luis Gaitan

The EURECA project has given me the opportunity to completely broaden my horizons with my career. I love making video games and animations, I’ve been making them since I was fourteen. I never realized how much my work with video games could impact the world and be applied to various other disciplines. Thanks to the EURECA project, now I do.

Our project consisted on creating a gamified application; these applications are video games that are used as tools to address and solve problems in the real world. So our job was to create a gamified application that addressed the issue of trash in developing nations. My role in this project was to design, and create the application itself. I started by researching various topics concerning trash and recycling in developing nations, specifically Egypt as that is the first nation where we’re going to release our application and gather data. But this brought about a series of obstacles I’ve never encountered, since I am not creating a game for an American audience, but to a global one. Immediately my view of how to make this game changed because I had to consider different cultures, and religious beliefs in those countries, as some iconography can be offensive. I set up a focus group consisting of volunteer Sam Houston State University students from different backgrounds, beliefs, and nationalities to get a better picture of how this application could reach a global audience. This led to the creation of the “Trash Hero” game, containing levels from Egypt, Colombia, South Africa, and the United States. The game is designed to be played by kids around the world while it teaches them about recycling as they have fun playing the game, creating a culture of responsibility and consciousness.